For those of us who travel regularly, we tend to stick with one airline so we can accumulate frequent flyer miles. We can then use those miles to buy seats on future flights. Some airlines have tightened up the rules on how frequent flyer miles are accumulated and how many seats may be available.

Germany’s airberlin and Southwest are the top two airlines when it comes to overall reward seat availability, at 100 percent, according to research done by Switchfly, a company that powers travel commerce and loyalty point redemption solutions


The “Annual Reward Seat Availability Survey,” conducted by IdeaWorksCompany, also found that these two airlines were followed by Virgin Australia (96.4 percent), Air Canada (90.7 percent), Singapore Airlines (90 percent), JetBlue (87.1 percent), and Lufthansa/SWISS/Austrian (87.1 percent) as leaders in the category.

Airberlin, Southwest, and Virgin Australia have placed within the top six in every edition of the reward survey since 2010.  But global network carriers Air Canada, Lufthansa and Singapore are now in the top five.

Every flight queried in the survey provided reward seats at saver-style lower point levels.  The 25 carriers in the survey remained the same as 2014, except Alitalia replaced US Airways, as the latter frequent flier program was merged with American Airlines in March 2015.

Three broad themes came into focus in the 2015 survey, according to Switchfly.  First, airlines overall are continuing to be more generous with reward seats. The average for all airlines for 2010 was 66.1 percent, which increased to 74 percent this year.

 Second, global network airlines are improving their rankings for long-haul reward seat availability.  Third, within the U.S., the availability of close-in reward seats is firmly entrenched as reality.  

United Airlines, Air Canada, Southwest Airlines and American Airlines all made meaningful improvements to offer more seats for departures only days or weeks away, with successful query scores ranging from 72 percent to 92 percent for this group of four airlines.

The big gainers this year were Alaska Airlines and Avianca.  Alaska’s overall reward availability score reached 80 percent due to a 21.4-point boost over last year’s result.  And its score for long-haul availability leapt more than 45 points.  It’s an amazing statistic because most of the routes queried are its popular Hawaii routes.  It’s not easy for an airline to allocate seats for these hot destinations because they are also easy to sell for cash fares.

Avianca boosted availability of rewards across the range of short-, medium- and long-haul markets. And while its overall position hovers near the bottom of the chart, the result still provide a meaningful improvement from 2014.

As in previous years, the survey found that frequent fliers get a bigger bang for their reward program bucks at lower-cost airlines. The average among these airlines -- Air Asia, airberlin, GOL, JetBlue, Southwest, and Virgin Australia -- was nearly 90 percent, while the more traditional carriers in the survey group registered 69.4 percent.

The lowest reward availability scores on the chart have improved significantly since 2010, when US Airways was at 10.7 percent and Delta was 12.9 percent. For 2015, the lowest airline score is 44.3 percent for LAN, but this result represents a significant 33.6-point improvement above the 10.7 percent result from 2010.

It may be a shock to those belonging to frequent flier programs, but airlines have become more generous with reward seat availability. Carriers have been motivated to improve reward availability for reasons beyond the ethic of fairness and the desire to polish their brands. More and more airlines are governed by accounting regulations that allow airlines to post revenue to their income statements only after a member redeems miles or points.

But there were also airlines It must be noted the reward availability results for some carriers did have big decreases for 2015. The overall score for Air China dropped to 50.7 percent, which represents a 25.7 point decrease from 2014. Turkish Airlines erased almost half of last year’s big gain by dropping 22.1 points to 63.6 percent for 2015. Brazil’s GOL scored the largest drop of any value-oriented airline by falling 20 points for an overall result of 70.7 percent.

The major loyalty industry news for 2014 was Delta’s announcement it would switch to revenue-based mileage accrual in 2015. This ranges from five points per dollar spent on base fares for members without status, up to 11 points for Diamond level members. The new method produces a windfall of miles for members paying higher fares, but cuts mileage accrual for members without status who book saver-type fares. A regular member buying a $316 roundtrip Atlanta – San Francisco ticket accrues 1,580 miles in 2015; that same trip delivered 4,278 miles in 2014.