Help! Need a quick answer
 

Just spent 20 minutes reading out a mini-RTW F reward to the AE rep and was getting near the end only to be told that I cannot book a United flight from HKG-SFO on Feb 23, 2012 because it is too far out. This despite it showing up on the AE site(and awardnexus site's). I mentioned I saw it on the AE site only to be told the site was "broken".

Is this correct and I need to wait a few days or did I get a dud rep and I should just call back?

Sometimes it is only 330 days out you can book - but call again and try another rep....

Hi YukonPrince, is there not a hard and fast rule about when you can book with United? I need to step out of the office to do this and having to wait 10 minutes to get through to an AE rep and then 20 mins of spoon feeding is tough. If I can find out what the rule is (if there is one?) then I can work with it.

UA has only loaded award inventories until Feb 17 as of today; so that would be about 330 days.

Darn website! If we plugin HKG to SFO on Feb 23rd, it lists UA 862 as an available option. :(

http://i51.tinypic.com/2eknhn9.jpg

I will pass this onto our colleagues over at Aeroplan to have a look at. Sorry about this.

proactive! I like it!

I think you mean reactive :)

Update I got is that Aeroplan is aware of this issue and a fix has already been planned which should be in place shortly. Sorry again to the OP for thinking there was F availability.

No problem Andrew, its not your fault. Now I just have to stop myself checking every day to see if our currently open segments get picked off before March 30th.

Yep, 23 Feb 2012 is 336 days from now; you'll probably have to wait until 330 days out. For reference, easiest way to check is probably Wolfram Alpha.

Yeah, hi klparrot, that's the March 30th date I mentioned above. I just googled calendar calculator and Bob's your uncle...

assuming the F flight that was more than 330 days out OP showed can be properly processed when booking online does this mean the fix will eliminate seeing (and maybe booking) further out?

Hi wwtsang,

The AE rep I spoke to told me if I had tried to book it, it would have failed with an error. So the assumption may be incorrect.

Update:

More grief from Aeroplan today. Decided to go there (HDY, Thailand) and back via Europe (LH and TG) rather than wait for TPAC UA flights to become available and confirmed flights with via ANA *A tool. Called in and was told flights that ANA said were available were not showing up in AE system. Sigh..... Hung up and found alternatives to flights in question and called back again. These showed up in my ANA _and_ AE web searches. Then I was told one of them was not showing up again (TG921). I refreshed my ANA and AE searches and sure enough I could still see it as available. CSR took about 10mins trying to get it to work, then as I was asking to speak to a supervisor all of a sudden he announced he could see the flight.

These all F AE reward trips are getting harder and harder to book. 2 failed calls and a third one that almost failed. 20 mins on hold for each. This was for Jan-Feb 2012. I imagine our next one in 2013 will be even harder if they are still allowed. Anyway, even though it sucked setting it up, we are very happy now. Thanks again Rexall, Amex and Sobeys! :D