Originally Posted by
Kremmen
It's really hard to get any meaning out of your statement. "likely can't stay up to 24 hours"? Is 17 hours ok? How about 15? 12? You definitely can stay up to 24 hours in SIN and/or BKK, The limit is as it always has been, you just can't get it if there are too many other options. There aren't many options intra-Asia, so the MNL-CGK will be easy to stretch out. Getting 3 stops is especially hard on the poor web site, so CGK-BKK-NRT-SFO might not be an option. Sure, you might have to settle for one or the other or squeeze both into the free flight.
What's your point? Surely this is known to every single person who's reading this thread by now? Equally obviously, you'll be limited by what scheduled flights exist. Getting a transit in the 15-20 hours range isn't hard.
e.g.
MNL-SIN-CGK SQ921/SQ960: 16h 55m connection
MNL-BKK-CGK TG621/TG433: 16h 40m connection
You can sometimes even get MNL-SIN-BKK-CGK SQ 919/SQ 974/TG433 for 16h 30m in SIN and 17h 40m in BKK
The point is simple. "You can stay up to 24 hours" is misleading at best, because it implies that you, as the customer, have control and can select flights that suit you. This was true under the old system -- you could combine any MNL-SIN flight with any SIN-CGK flight that departed less than 24 hours later, provided that both segments had availability. Now, you're limited to whatever options happen to show up when you search MNL-CGK. It's a
huge downgrade. MNL-CGK does happen to give you quite a few options that include an overnight transfer, but that's far from universal and happens mostly due to the fairly limited *A schedule operated ex-MNL. It's still possible to find examples, though. I did a search for MNL-CGK and sorted by length of travel, and your suggestion of SQ919/SQ974/TG433 comes up. The next one down combines SQ921/SQ976/TG433. However, you can't book SQ919/
SQ976/TG433, even though the inventory is obviously there and both transfers would be under 24 hours.
The 24-hour rule is no longer part of the award system and was specifically called out by UA as being removed when they made the change.
I apologize if my original message was unclear, and I hope this helps.
