If you’re trying to book an Air India flight using your United miles, you cannot…at least for the time being.
United Airlines has had some issues with its Star Alliance partner award inventory lately. For several weeks, bookings with Thai Airways and TAP Air Portugal were not available (they are back). ANA was down for a day. Singapore Airlines has been down for months and remains unbookable online or over the phone. Now we can Air India to the list.
Reader Rajib left a comment stating:
United is not allowing award booking on Air India flights since March 15 2019. 1K desk does not have any information about when the issue will be resolved. Thus very limited options for travel to cities in India on United awards.
Since I steer most people away from Air India, I had not noticed the lack of award space. Sure enough, search for simple routes like New Delhi to Mumbai and you’ll be met with no search results:
A reservation agent verified that Air India space has been unavailable for over a week.
I reached out to United and received the following response from a spokesperson:
We’re working with Air India to address this and it is our collective goal to have availability back soon.
Hopefully, this will be a quick fix and not a prolonged problem like the Singapore Airlines award space. I’ll update this post as warranted.
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Before Air India joined Star Alliance United allowed booking award flights from the Middle East (Tel-Aviv, for an example) to the Indian subcontinent (HYD,GAY) via South East Asia (Thai Airways / Singapore Airlines), simply because there were no other options.
It looks like that even though Air India is not bookable, the mileage plus routing rules still forbids routing via SEA. Any clue if phone representatives will be able to override this limitation until the Air India award space will be bookable again?
United still blocking StarAlliance Upgrade Awards on TAP. Several weeks ago, I purchased B on United.com. United 1K, 1KMP, WebSupport and Customer Care still have “…no idea why they are being blocked and our IT team is working on it….”
While the award seats were restored, the SAUA are still blocked! Not sure what other *A carriers are being blocked by UA.
Blessing in disguise. No decent person should fly AI.
“Hopefully, this will be a quick fix…” – Yeah, cause you know, Air India flights are on everyone’s aspirational experience lists. 🙂
Seems like United is doing everyone a favor?
Why would anyone want to go to India, let alone fly on Air India to get there????
You just spoke a fact.
Seems to be fixed now