I booked a trip to Paris for 4/1 using United Miles(business class)- they booked us on Lufthansa to land in Paris at 8:00 a.m. Got a phone call last night that Lufthansa was cancelling the flight. United rebooked us on a much later flight to Munich with a 4 hour layover and then Munich to Paris landing at 4:25 p.m. We lose an entire day in Paris. I called United 5x between last night and today and there are absolutely NO award seats (in any class) available on the dates. I really needed to be in paris before early afternoon. I called Air Canada to no avail. Anyone have any suggestions. The United people told me to call them every week to see if any seats open up.

Can anyone give me any suggestions on what to do.
Thanks.

Welcome to FlyerTalk!

When I have had schedule changes or cancellations on int'l biz award ticket in the past (albeit with NW, not UA), they were far more flexible in the reticketing. Once when my flight was badly delayed and I would have missed my connection in CDG to MRU, they booked us seats on a PrivatAir flight IAH-CDG so we could make the original connection. I would think that they wouldn't restrict you to reticketing on award inventory seats only when there was a cancellation, but I have no experience/history specific to UA.

If you don't get the answer you want, call again and speak to a different representative. It is tedious, but sometimes the best way.

If a moderator can move this to the UA forum, you may be better responses.

peace,
~Ben~

Thanks for responding. First post!! United rebooked us on business class but on a much crappier flight. i guess we have to be thankful for that. I was just wondering if there was any other way to find out if more seats could become available.

Thanks

Maybe you should try going a day earlier. An extra day in Paris is good.

You shouldn't be "just thankful for that" in my opinion -- try to get something you actually want out of them. If you want to look up seat availability, there are a number of tools you can use. The best is the KVS, which you can search for on here or check out the Sticky in the Mileage Run forum for a link to it.

Here are some others:
http://www.seatcounter.com/
http://flyaow.com/classamex.htm

Hopefully you can arm yourself with information for your calls back to UA. When using these you'll likely have to educate yourself about the fare bucket codes if you don't know already so that you can make sense of it.

peace,
~Ben~

Please also see: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...rnational.html

You were booked on LH so LH is responsible for getting you an acceptable flight, not UA. I went through this with UA and AC a month ago. If you get a good agent you can ask for alternative LH options (check these beforehand) and ask them to accomodate you on those. You can not force award availablity on UA or AC but you should be able to do it on LH. Good luck.

Welcome to Flyertalk.

As you have cross-posted this in the UA forum, I'm going to close it here.

Regards,

Flipside