I'm a bit confused here... maybe I'm misunderstanding how this thing works, but I was always under the impression that award seats were simply seats in another bucket (e.g. in biz, the paid buckets are J,C,D, etc. while award seats are I) and that anybody who has access to the bucket list (har!) can see what's in all of them. So if KVS, EF, etc. can all still see what's in the rest of the alphabet soup, why can't they see what's in X, I, and O? Did UA hide those buckets from the general public completely? Because if yes, how can partner airlines find available seats to show me when I search for my dates on their site (or ask over the phone)? And if not, why can't EF get the info the same way partner airlines do?
(Side note: I pulled up a UA flight on EF's availability tool, and clicked to create an alert. Even though "I" was not one of the fare classes listed on the page, I typed it in, and EF allowed me to create the alert without generating any errors. Think it'll actually trigger? At the rate things are going, I'm guessing it won't...)
