My programme shows no award seats but a partner's site shows plenty on the same flight — what am I missing?

Also check whether there is a phone booking fee and whether it gets waived when the seat is not bookable online. In my experience programmes will waive it if you politely point out their site could not display the flight, but you have to ask before they issue the ticket rather than after. It is worth confirming the total including taxes and surcharges on the same call, because those vary enormously between programmes on the exact same partner flight.

Worth checking whether the seats you are seeing are the partner's own members-only inventory. Airlines release different award buckets to their own members than they make available to partners, so 'plenty of seats' on their site can be entirely invisible to everyone else by design. I chased that for a whole evening once before someone explained it.

Very known thing, and it has two separate causes that look identical from the outside. Either the programme's website genuinely cannot display that partner online — plenty of partnerships are phone-only bookings even in 2026 — or the seats you can see are being released in a booking class your programme does not have access to. The first is fixable by ringing them with flight numbers and dates in hand; the second is not fixable at all. Ask the agent to look up the specific flight and they will usually tell you which of the two it is within a minute.

Do not transfer anything anywhere until the agent has the seat held. That is the mistake that costs people, and it is much easier to make when you are excited that you finally found the flight.