Just days after loosening up award routing rules, United has now made booking an award online a little easier–at least in theory.
New features rolled out this week on United’s Mileage Plus website include the ability to book:
- Mixed class, mixed type (saver/standard) flights in one itinerary
- Open jaw itineraries
- Miles + Money tickets for all classes of service (formally only available for saver economy tickets)
These changes sound great, but we don’t call united.com “.bomb” for nothing. Problems abound on the new site. The same old problem of availability showing up (for example one business class seat from Los Angeles to Australia) but being unbookable is still there. The premium award tricks continue as well. For example, a search for a first class ticket from SFO to SYD may turn up a “positive” result for SFO-LAX-SYD. But when you click through, you discover that SFO-LAX is in first class but LAX-SYD is in economy. That is trickery.
In addition to the pervasive booking problems I mention above (that have been around for years) the new site is very buggy and often crashes. For example, United and Continental tickets can’t be booked together right now (only UA, US, and CO tickets can be booked online). Today, I cannot even search for an award: every time I try to search I get the following error message:
Believe me, I know how to enter in city pairs–they just disappear when you click on search…
And that’s not all: prices have gone up on Miles + Money tickets. Tickets that used to be 15,000 miles plus about $150 are now 12,500 miles and approaching $400. That is not a good change.
It is essential that United get their act together in fixing their award site. While UA’s intentions are good, the newly revealed award site has only made award bookings harder.
I’ve found the same errors, and although I do like the new interface when it works, it takes a lot of work to get the bugs out. Unfortunately this roll-out will probably not see much of an update as everything is transfered to Continental’s front end.
As for being able to search, I’ve found you have to be fully logged in, otherwise it gives you that error.
Higher prices on Miles & Money tickets? That is disappointing, since their inflight food & service is so disappointing, compared to Asian carriers over the Pacific. SQ and Thai Air are so far ahead in quality/variety of food & service in premium cabins.
Yeah – I used to fly often last year from DC to CID for 10,000 miles and $80 + tax/fees.
Trying today, it’s looking like 12,500 and $237 + tax/fees. That SUCKS!
I also ran into the above screen grab earlier, but I switched from Safari to Chrome and it worked. Weird.
But I can’t find any 10,000 + $80 tickets… All the way to end of May. Is it a seasonal increase in price?
I fly frequently on business btween India and US. When I lived in the US, I used to be a Mileage Plus member. Since moving back to India I became a member of Lufthansa Miles and More program. I normally use that number for ALL Star Alliance flights, including the last one in Sep 2010. However, for my latest trip (in March 2011) I decided to use my Mileage Plus number. I was in for a surprise when the miles got credited. I got HALF the Base miles on UA as I got on LH when I flew the SAME flight number between the SAME cities in the same Class Z (Business Class), paying almost the SAME Money. When I wrote to UA they said they do not consider “Z class” as Business and Lufthansa’s policies were “different” than UA’s, and basically, that was tough. As an example, on flight LH 750 between Frankfurt and Calcutta, I received 9185 base miles in LH in Sep 2010, but 4599 miles on UA. Even on an atlas, it is closer to 9000 miles than 4500 . There is a ticket open (REF:12151345A) with UA to explain this where I have sent them a reply after they said inane things like “You cannot claim miles from 2 different airlines for the same flight”. Will keep you posted. But, it seems, switching to Miles and More will give members more miles for the SAME flights than UA.