Originally Posted by
petes
.... But now often I see two logical connecting flights that have XN inventory when viewed individually, but when I search the awards they come up with a hgher level number of miles required, and the system often offers up a horrible alternate connection (5 hours connecting time) with the lower level award level, even though the most logical connecting flights had XN inventory when viewed seperately (and they dont show XN when viewed together). Whats going on here? Is this a new ruse to just extract extra miles out of us all, or a bug in the system? Anyone else notice this?
There have been a number of changes over the past couple of years to address concerns that UA had with abuses of the system, unfortunately it has made it significantly more difficult to find decent routings. In your case, with multiple segments needed to get to many locations, the system gives up to easily.
One suggestion is just do one-way (OW) searches and not round-trips (RT). With RTs the number of potential routings would naturally go up but UA is capping the searches at some fixed number (200?). By trying OW those searches are just focused on a smaller problems and can occasionally find better routing. You can then book as two OWs or try to call have have the two valid OWs convert to a RT (YMMV on the success of this)
The separate one-ways does mean no excursion segments but again an agent might be able to build the RT and add the excursion.