I spent much of the day on the phone with UA today and all of the agents were quite pleasant to deal with, even the ones who didn't know what they were doing.

One of today's objectives was to book an award ticket for a friend with a different last name. In the past, this would have entitled a schlep to the airport for the privilege of signing a "bluey" to sanctify the deal. However, a Chicago-based agent, who was especially pleasant and knowledgeable, advised me that this is no longer necessary. She explained that a new system has been implemented within the last week in which everything can be done over the phone, even when the last names differ.

I put the ticket on the hold and when I called back, a different agent knew nothing about this and insisted that I would need to go to the airport. He also initially rejected the perfectly allowable stopover on the award ticket until I corrected him. After a bit of coaxing on my part, he agreed to contact a supervisor regarding the award signoff issue and ultimately conceded that the new procedure is correct.

The way it all works, at least as far as my sample size of "one" was concerned, required that he contact Mileage Plus and conference all of us in together. This actually required three attempts on his part because he dropped the mileage plus agent's line after each attempt but he eventually made it all happen. Once on line, the Mileage Plus agent asked me a few top secret questions and then the deed was done. She also politely pointed out that I could have done the whole thing on line with ual.com, apparently unaware of the fact that it is very difficult to do many things easily via ual.com, especially not Star Alliance awards with stopovers.

Anyway, I did not see this tidbit of information listed elsewhere on FT but feel free to merge or delete if its old news. IMHO, this is a very nice improvement that, along with the relatively recent ability to email itineraries via ual.com represent some great leaps forward.