Folks, wandering over from the AA side so forgive me if this is already well know. I was helping some friends use their UA MP miles but had to book on the phone via an agent since UA.com couldn’t handle the full routing on line.

The UA MP agents (both in the US and Philippines) office said the following flights were not available:
• Sat. Jan 18, 2014: LH 413 depart EWR 825pm and arrive MUC 1030am next day
• Sat. Jan 18, 2014: LH 405 depart JFK 405pm and arrive FRA 12:10pm next day

We played the game of are you sure the flight exists, are you sure it is not UA or SQ metal, agent says let me go on Lufthansa’s web site to check, and once they confirmed the flights exist they still couldn’t book it. I even spoke to supervisors both times.

While this is going on I can see the Saver award space on UA.com for both the flights but I just can't book the entire 1 way without the UA.com software giving me an error because the routing (2 connections in this case) is too complex for the software.

I finally got transferred to someone in UA web support and she was able to help book the flights as I wanted and all turned out well.

Is this remnants of *Net blocking that UA used to do? Is this pretty normal and is the web support desk the best way to deal with it if it happen in the future. Just want to know for next time so I don’t have to waste 3-4 hours gain with the normal MP agents.

Thanks, in advance!

-miles