A modest proposal:
Can we get a wiki listing the United partners whose award inventory is always/usually/sometimes just phantom inventory?
For those unfamiliar with the term "phantom inventory", here's what it means: you do a search on united.com for award flights, and some of the award seats offered up are in fact not really available to United (or so they will claim after you have booked the flights). This "phantom inventory" is a result of United and their alliance partners failing to accurately reflect actual inventory. Typically, the experience goes like this: you search for an award flight, find something that looks acceptable, maybe you transfer in some Chase Ultimate Rewards points to top off your United MileagePlus account (a process which is purported to be one-way
and irreversible, it's worth noting). With your UA miles ready to spend, you go to book the award flight(s) on united.com. Then, you may get an error, something along the lines of "Due to rapidly changing inventory, the selected flight is no longer available" (this is an outright lie: the flight was never actually available, it didn't just disappear a second before you tried to book it). In other cases, the award booking appears to actually go through - they deduct the miles from your UA MP account, you have a booking
receipt (though not a real ticket), and all appears good...then in 24 hours or so, you get a notice informing you that the award on the UA partner couldn't be booked (the real reason for that is because it didn't exist in the first place) and you're left with a failed booking, your points have been taken, and it's your problem to sort out (some folks don't even realize they don't really have a seat to their destination - I bet some have only found out when they go to check in, a real nightmare).
This has been a major problem for many years, across many United partners, including (but not limited to) Lufthansa, Swiss, SAS, Aer Lingus, LOT, and probably a dozen more. This can really hose you (especially if you transfer Chase UR points right before you go to book). Frankly, it's shameful that United has let this go on for so long, without a fix. They clearly don't give a damn about it and have no intention of fixing it.
You can easily find horror stories from MileagePlus members in many threads here. Alas, these stories are scattered across many different threads, and people usually only learn about phantom inventory after it has happened to them (or after investing a lot of their time trying to find a way to book an award flight which eventually fails).
It would be a great help for folks trying to use their miles to have this problem highlighted in a single thread (my apologies if one already exists - I looked and didn't see one). The problem is that most stories from people who have had this happen to them are not easily discovered because they're scattered across many individual threads about consolidated general experiences booking partner awards (eg:
Aer Lingus (EI) award booking experiences [Consolidated] ). Few people would know to do a search for "phantom inventory" (except for those who already know about the problem) so having it in a single thread should help educate users. Who knows, it might even shame United enough to actually fix the problem that has plagued so many for so long (and they should indeed be ashamed - imagine any other business that advertised something you can buy, and only after you've committed to buying it, with irreversible prerequisite steps already taken, then they say "oh sorry, you can't have that"?).
I'd suggest a wiki post, with a table or simple list of UA partners known to have phantom inventory. It would be helpful to include some data that characterizes if the inventory shown on united.com is always 100% phantom, sometimes, or rarely, or some other grading system. Users can chime in with their experiences and discuss related issues - for example, when united.com only will show you routings with phantom inventory, and refuses to show other, valid routings with real, bookable inventory.
Do others feel this would be a worthwhile resource?