Here's an excerpt from a post I just made in the "Maximum segments on UA award travel" thread. May be helpful to some people here:
I heard today from two different phone reps (one a support desk supervisor and one a phone agent, spearate calls) that effective April 25, United has new routing restrictions on award tickets going from the US to Asia over the Atlantic.
One agent read the memo to me and it said something like "Effective immediately, we are restricting connections permitted on award travel from the US to Asia/Japan over the Atlantic. Maximum connections on a one way ticket is three. Maximum connections on a round trip is four each way."
Note that the word connection is used, not segments.
After the first rep (a rate desk supervisor) had told me about this memo, I called in with a dummy booking SIN-FRA-IST-EWR-LAS and an agent priced it out at 60,000 miles in J. 3 connections (4 segments) on a one way, so it's valid routing.
I called back to add BKK to the beginning of the itinerary, which would make it BKK-SIN-FRA-IST-EWR-LAS. It would not price. That's 4 connections (5 segments) on a one way, invalid routing. That's when the next agent said "Oh, we have a new rule on this" and she read the April 25 memo to me.
Anyway, I know that agents often say a lot of nonsensical things, but two different reps on two different calls cited the "April 25" memo to me, one of them read it to me, and it seems verified by the computer's rejection of BKK-SIN-IST-FRA-EWR-LAS. The "system" now only allows 3 connections (4 segments) on a one way from US to Asia, or 4 connections (5 segments) on each leg of a round trip between U.S. and Asia.