from my limited experience it does not, but what do others think?

Starnet is a Star Alliance software product, not a UA-designed product despite what the UA forum believes. I posted links to the *A site's software info pages about Starnet in one of the many threads there complaining about starnet. Search should pull it up.

So yes, I'd guess that US and all *A airlines use Starnet.

The meaningful question is: "Does US filter the award availability of other *A partners?", not "Does US use Starnet?".

From the UA experience, it appears that Starnet allows:
1) A member airline to filter out (by airline? by route? by secret internal intra-star payment amount?) visibility of award inventory which the other *A airlines are actually making available. Thus the common case that the ANA airline award booking tool shows flights available that United's reps don't even see in Starnet as configured by United.

2) A member airline to provide award inventory to certain partners via Starnet which is not available to other partners via their configuration of Starnet. Ths the less-common but reported case of United having Lufthansa or other partner flights available which do not show on ANA's award site.

It's not if they use Starnet - it's how they use it.

From what I've read on the US board when I drop in here, it sounds like US doesn't filter out as much as UA does (or the other airlines don't filter out US redemption as much as they do UA).

Also - there's the issue of whether the airline allows their reps to do a segment-by-segment "manual sell" of flights that don't appear in their version of Starnet. UA no longer allows their reps to do it; US might. In fact US probably had to allow that because when US cut over to Shares last spring, for a long time the Shares system couldn't get at most international partner availability.

I've noticed that US seems to allow more TG redemptions than UA, anybody else have experiences?

Starnet is a Star Alliance software product, not a UA-designed product despite what the UA forum believes. I posted links to the *A site's software info pages about Starnet in one of the many threads there complaining about starnet. Search should pull it up.

So yes, I'd guess that US and all *A airlines use Starnet.
<snip>

This is an excellent explanation of Starnet - thank you. I agree that there is much more focus on this over on the UA boards, perhaps because of the amount of filtering that goes on between UA and starnet.

I also agree that US seems to have fewer restrictions on award availability, at least between N.A. and Asia, including NH, TG, and SQ (I actually posted once about a limited test I did on that - I'll see if I can find the link sometime). Of course, finding a well-informed booking agent is another question altogether! :rolleyes:

I've noticed that US seems to allow more TG redemptions than UA, anybody else have experiences?
I have never had problems redeeming US miles on TG, even in business class, even on BKK-JFK.