Upgraded Points notes an odd phenomenon on united.com: more United MileagePlus partner awards appear by making one small adjustment to the settings.
Glitch? More Partner Award Space With United MileagePlus After One Easy Adjustment To Settings
Partner awards are increasingly elusive across all alliances as carriers move toward restricting award space to their own loyalty program members. Even so, there is still some partner award redemptions available, though these tend to be few and far between.
But in the case of United MileagePlus, more partner awards may be available simply by changing your location–an easy adjustment on the united.com homepage.
For example, on June 21st, if you search from New York (JFK) to Frankfurt (FRA) on United’s US page, you see no space:
But change the page from US to Canada and voila, you see Singapore Airlines has space in business class:
I’ve been able to replicate this across numerous dates…
Upgraded Points also reports this “trick” works for LOT Polish Airlines.
Deliberate Point-Of-Sale Booking Restriction Or Technical Glitch?
It’s too early to tell whether this award filtering is deliberate or unintentional.
Years ago, United engaged in “StarNet blocking” and filtered out certain partner award space. This space was sometimes bookable over the phone by asking agents to do a manual request or “need-need” for the flight in question, but that was quite hard since United restricted its agents from doing so.
I suspect this is unintentional, but it also would not surprise me if it is intentional: after all business class round-trip tickets that originate in the USA tend to be far more expensive than those that originate in Europe (or other points outside the USA). Why? Because airlines (not just US airlines but all of them) have determined that travelers originating from the US are willing to pay more.
We could well be seeing that United is masking some partner space because it feels no need to make it available from a US point of sale. With so many miles floating around, United may prefer to offload some of its mileage liability by only offering higher-priced mileage seats.
CONCLUSION
A curious thing is happening on united.com: you can find more award space using your MileagePlus miles–at least on Singapore Airlines and LOT Polish–by changing your location to another country like Canada.
Have you seen this before? Have you found any other carriers this “trick” works for?
I just checked and wow…it’s true. This is crazy. If it is intentional once again U.S. flyers are getting hosed. Bad enough that we pay three times as much for premium cabins originating here. But now it seems that better partner award redemptions are made available for same flights to those outside the U.S.
That parasite site now risking a good loophole for those in the know
Well hope it lasts. Looking for LAX – NRT SQ would be a nice ride.
This may be a recent glitch. My only evidence is that my location is set to Canada by default based on my address and I’ve rarely seen Singapore award space over my searches for the past few months from US airports (I mostly search from Detroit but will look at Chicago or NYC), but I do observe the same finding this week.
Could potentially be point to point on non-stops without a feeder flight on UA to get to it. Example being JFK-FRA – but add in DTW as originating and it doesn’t show.
The age old question of if you should share something sweet you find or keep it to yourself and exploit it until you can’t anymore. In the gambling world it’s an easy decision when you find a glitch or setting error in a slot machine. Finding the right amount of money you can make without drawing attention is usually the correct choice.
I shared it because Upgraded Points wrote that they reached out to United about it.
That means it will either be fixed/closed or confirmed…but that’s it.
Your theory about deliberate POS restrictions makes sense, but then why would UA only restrict LO and SQ space? They should restrict ex-USA space of other partners, and potentially on their own metal as well.
Maybe a trial before it is expanded?
Just tried to book an available flight and it wont actually book.
SQ or LO?
This has been my experience. Last time I believe it errored due to credit card being US and not matching region/currency selected.
It logs me out of my MPLUS acct. once I do the switch.