I don't remember any recent positive results, but you can try. Book YVR-TYO-PER, and call to see if YYZ-YVR can be added. If not, you can always cancel within 24 hours.

Just saw the return has the PER-TYO-YVR-YYZ available. Will ask them to see if they can do something about this. How stupid the system that is.

Thank you jsloan.

The rule for several years now has been that agents can book the same routings that are returned through the online search function, nothing more. The days of piecing an itinerary together segment by segment are long gone.

There are very rare exceptions reported.

Indeed, my recent trip to Egypt (with a stopover in EU) required making two one-way award bookings to get the routings/carriers I wanted.

I've encountered a relatively new problem I'd like to confirm -- UA agents are no longer able to change class-of-service on an existing LH booking unless the full route is available as a new ticket.

My past experience, as well as the opinion of senior agents I've spoken with, has been that the class-of-service for a segment on an LH award can be modified independently of the rest of the reservation. As long as the flight numbers, cities, times, etc do not change, a single segment can be swapped from Business to First (my general use case). I believe I was able to do so as recently as three weeks ago on the outbound for my current vacation (BOS-MUC-FRA-HND, where the two long-hauls had F availability open intermittently).

Over the past week I've tried to do this for our return travel, unsuccessfully. I've worked with multiple agents and escalations, and changing a single segment -- even if it shows availability -- has LH send back "wait list" rather than "confirmed". (I've been able to see this in the booking record as well.) So far I've been able to find alternative, inconvenient routing to work around this (swapping LHR-MUC-BOS to LHR-DUS-MUC-BOS, for example), but this otherwise seems to be a huge devaluation in my award booking options.

Has anyone else encountered this? Any ideas on the cause of the change?

This is noted in the wiki above: “Changing any segment MIGHT require current availability for all existing Os&Ds in the PNR (as if a brand new booking is made) - YMMV”

It has been the case since 2016. Many of us have found it isn’t always the case though. YMMV truly applies.

Ah; thanks. YMMV is definitely the case � I�ve done this about two dozen times in the past and this is my first problem. (I�m certain it�s not the skill of knowledge of the agents I worked with; they were above and beyond.) Perhaps an problem ex. LHR....

It's not a change to the computer, just a change to what agents are willing to do (and possibly which system they see first).

I booked both segments (not the ones I wanted) and then called to change. Spent more than one hour on two calls with their supervisors also and could not get anything done. Sigh.

One can make changes online after booking a flight?

How did you manage to get it ticketed online? One of my choices had the same issue and after two tries I went with another option.

While change flights can be done online, it is dangerous if a partner flight is involved, you can end up in a state where the change fails but the original flights are lost and UA can not restore them.

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?

There are a number of things that may have happened
-- Award inventory is dynamic and what wasn't there 10 minutes can now be available and the reserse is equally true.
-- It may have been there but wasn't ranked at the top, the UA search engine ranks offerings based on a number factors (not publically known -- they probably include convenience factors {trip time, layover times, time of day, ...} and cost is there also -- but unclear how all this rolls together) -- you can force the lowest cost or least stops to the top (clicking on the column) to override UA's ranking
-- UA search engine "stops" after finding X results (200?) so potential solutions are missed
-- Lousy search
-- ....

For paid flights you can have the same issues and many use Matrix / Google Flights to a different / better set of results/ Not all search engines are created equal or work the same.

I looked up the same route on UA's website today and what do you know, saver award availability on the IAD-IST-CGK itinerary is the first thing that pops up. The IAD-IST-SIN-CGK itinerary is no longer there.

What I still can't figure out is why we were charged only 70k miles each for a J class ticket from the US to SE Asia.

I don't understand the taxes for a trip I'm planning. Pricing as individual awards:

#1 intra-Japan, $0 taxes
#2 intra-Europe, $52 taxes
#3 intra-Japan, $0 taxes

But the taxes, when booked together (with the intra-Europe flight as my "free"/excursionist), totals $105.

Does this seem right? Is there a way to get a tax-breakdown before I purchase?

Here's a new one. I had my brother-in-law and sister-in-law booked SEZ-ADD-(LFW)-IAH in C. I was checking on seating assignments for them on the ADD-IAH sector and noticed it said that the flight left at 8:30 in the morning. When I pulled up the itinerary on united.com, it showed that flight left at 21:30. So, essentially there was a schedule change and ET hadn't notified UA so I never got an alert. This was going to make them misconnect. So, I scrambled for options, found two saver seats on ADD-LHR and then I called UA and they were nice enough to open up C space on LHR-DEN-IAH.

Their final destination is actually SLC, but I couldn't get the agent to change the destination because it was over 1,000 miles away from IAH (new one for me). I asked if she could just change the final destination to DEN then, and then she told me it couldn't be over 500 miles away. Not sure why the policy changed in those 30 seconds. Either way, I'll just have them collect their luggage in DEN (if they check any) and then no-show for the IAH flight. My apologies for anyone flying on the flight that they're not taking as they have two seats in First booked.

Chris