Sounds weird. On airfare we know they do personalized prices with cookies and IP address's. Never heard of something like this in award travel.
Yup makes no sense. When I am logged in to my continental account I have a ton of availability and it does say non-elite, but on my wifes or logged out there is no 12.5k availability...
Problem was that she had the miles in her account and I wanted to use those up, I ended up calling in and spoke to a few people who all said there is no availability. I finally got a guy who said to book it and then give him the confirmation number and he would switch it to my wifes account.
He said for some reason the computer is allowing my account to book XN class fares which are the Elite fares...