A funny thing happened to me last night with UA's award system.

After months of planning it was finally time to book our trip to Indonesia next year. I found the flights we wanted to take, there was saver award availability in J the whole way (IAD-IST-BKK-CGK) and we had the points. Everything looked good. I transfer the necessary UR points to my UA account, go through the booking process, click "purchase." UA's site gives me an error.

I thought I might have gotten screwed by phantom award availability so I call up UA's support number. The woman on the phone was very helpful. It turns out there was award inventory in J from IAD-IST-CGK without the unnecessary stop in BKK. Additionally this itinerary will only cost me 70,000 miles for for some reason. I ask if there are two seats available since my wife and I are traveling together and indeed there are. As of this morning we have an email saying the itinerary is ticketed and confirmed and we have a confirmation number with TK.

Obviously this worked out well for us but I have to ask, what the heck happened? How was there a cheaper, more convenient itinerary available that never showed up on UA's search engine?