Trying to book award travel to China. Nothing is available on Star Alliance partners. I haven't checked each airline availability. Is it possible that LH, OS, OZ, NH, SG, CA all have eliminated award seats to China? Or UA is blocking the award seats on Star Alliance?

SFO-PVG (4 weekly) is UA's only flights to China. On scattered dates, UA charges $5700 for economy and $17000 for business.



Award ticket costs a whopping 300K miles for economy and 450K miles for business. For a family of 4, this means almost 2 million miles. It's up to everyone to decide if it's worth it.

Welcome to new Mileage Minus dynamic pricing. United Peso (following DL SkyPeso).



Even if I decide to dump half million miles for this, UA won't allow me to redeem miles LAX-SFO-PVG. I have to buy separate LAX-SFO ticket. See below.



Evidently, UA is selling LAX-SFO-PVG without any issue.




What's going on?

Same thing happens for the return China-USA. For example, PVG-SFO and SFO-BOS shows plenty of saver Y award XN, yet PVG-SFO-BOS has zero award, not even standard award YN and JN.



This is just absurd.


It appears that United has sealed off China as some special Kingdom for MP redemption. You can't buy a connecting award ticket to and from China from any US city other than the gateway, SFO.

By the way, you can't buy domestic China connecting flights such as SFO-PVG-CTU even if UA has SFO-PVG award space, and CA/ZH has PVG-CTU award space for Star Alliance redemption..

Is this a new United strategy trying to squeeze more miles, or some IT bug? It is sooooo annoying.