I just booked our first TATL/TPAC for a flight after January 31 (when the elite base would change) ... was looking for flights to LHR on a W fare in April flying through either IAD or EWR. I was surprised to find of the 9 options given me at the UA website, 7 of the TATL flights had R9 availability and 1 had R5 availability. Only one was R0. On the return flights at least half had R9 availability. Maybe that's normal for EWR-LHR or IAD-LHR (which I don't usually fly).

But we will be flying to Australia this summer, so I randomly checked some LAX-SYD flights (Australian winter of course) and found lots of R bucket availability. Are others finding increased R availability?

Of course an alternative explanation (to fewer 1ks and hence fewer GPUs) is that UA can't fill their planes with paying customers on J/P/Z fares ...

Because of schedule flexibility, we've never had a major problem using our GPUs but in the past it has often required some work. It's never been this easy ...