stephem

I have been working on a reservation for a couple of weeks now. I was short about 2k miles for LAX-HND-LAX and so have been waiting for an SPG transfer. I finally have given up on the transfer (it said 2-4 days) and am just going to do SFO-NRT-SFO, which I have the miles for now.

My experience mimics what SuiteFlight reports, there are only a couple of people at EY Guest who know how to do this and if you get one of those people then (a) it's easy and (b) availability maps exactly to what UA shows on its site.

Because I didnt have enough miles, the helpful person (in Manchester call center) gave me his contact info and told me to email back when the miles had transferred. He created an ANA reservation for the LAX-HND-LAX flights we wanted and said it would only remain active for 12 hours. In reality it was live for over 3 days before ANA cancelled it. The space went right back and I can now see that on UA.com again. But as I said, now we are moving to just grab some acceptable dates on SFO-NRT-SFO because we have a small window of acceptable dates. He has been super responsive as I've gone back and forth on what to do, the delay on the miles, etc. Quite a pleasure actually compared to some EY interactions I have had. I got the ticketing confirmation for SFO-NRT-SFO and oddly, taxes were more than what OP reported, for IAD, $264.70 per person.

One of the best part about this award is where the miles came from, nothing like a family account and 5 pax on CMB-AUH-JFK-LAX-DFW F to accrue some miles... that CMB-DFW F fare is apparently a gift that keeps on giving.

As an aside, people may want to clean up some of their posts in here and make it more of a "how to" for redeeming on ANA (even a thread title change?). We'll all be better off in the end I think...