Originally Posted by jasonvr
Sorry for the misunderstanding. I focused too much on the following sentence
I had thought you were implying that all "dollar off" certs were restricted against Internet fares which is not the case. Didn't want people to just assume that their T&C's would be the same because their certs are "dollar off" certs.
That being said, I have experienced many failures where all fares should be eligible, and are marked as such with the little green star, but yet the website still fails miserably with the ubiquitous "I found a lower fare that is not e-Cert eligible" message which is of course impossible because all fares should be eligible.
Eventhough we may have miscommunications via the things that we type, I think we can all agree that United.com needs a major overhaul in the area of e-Certs (as well as many other places as evidenced by the fact that we now have a sticky thread dedicated to it)
OK, no problem. Glad we are on the same page after all. ^
To reiterate what I've said here and on the other relevant threads: Sometimes the website works fine with e-certs and sometimes it screws up horribly.
And as for
WindFlyer's question about "multi-city" itineraries (that are in reality roundtrips), I gave up trying to use that option because the website seemed to be programmed to automatically reject it as ineligible. I don't know if this has been fixed; it's been a while since I tried it.
BTW, a workaround I use to get the website to show more of the possible itineraries is to edit the URL: I change the "air_avail" parameter to make it larger than the normal 20 (or 10 or 5). This is a suggestion made by another FTer (whose name I can't recall now). Unfortunately, even if air_avail is set to a very high number, like 200 or even more, it doesn't magically show ALL possible itineraries. But at least it will usually show MORE of them.
And I should add by way of explanation as to how I was able to have so much success with my ten e-certs, given the website malfunctioning: First of all, many of my trips were mileage runs, and they were all discretionary. So if one itinerary and/or destination and/or date didn't work, I would try different ones. And/or I would come back to the website later and try again. It really took a lot of persistence, a truly unreasonable amount of persistence in fact. I don't think the average consumer should be expected to go through that to redeem e-certs!!!
