So I have generally stopped checking Kayak before booking my flights because I always book United these days. With the 1K 100% bonus miles the value of the additional miles from an HKG-ORD ticket almost always offsets any cash savings from flying a different airline (which is often very little if anything at all).

However I am going to have to go back to searching Kayak, because when I do a "lowest available fare" search tonight on United.com Hong Kong to Chicago (departing 1/19 returning 1/28) I get $1453 via Newark, while Kayak yields a ticket via Tokyo and Seattle for $1178. Not exactly a trivial difference, and the 2-stop cheaper flight is actually an hour shorter in total time. The Kayak link just goes straight to the United website, and the ticket shows up just fine there. But this ticket cannot by found by searching directly on United.com. What the hell? Are there other tricks to find lower fares? This just makes me feel like I need to spend more time on the already laborious process of ticket booking.


On another note, they are still screwing up the upgrade process. Wednesday night I bought a ticket (which I have since cancelled) for Friday travel HKG-ORD. I was surprised to see RN=3 on this normally very difficult route/day, and jumped on it planning to GPU. But it took a few minutes to ticket, so I went to dinner, came back, and found RN=0. Sure it's my fault for going to dinner, just saying, this was clearly not supposed to be RN=3 in the first place, because there turns out to be no space in business whatsoever, and a long airport waitlist when I checked in today. I'm sure it was just something weird in their computer system causing a few hours of unintentional availability. Three lucky people may have jumped ahead in line after getting an EF alert, or it may have just disappeared on its own.