TheBagman

I spent quite a bit of time last night attempting to book DEN-KTM (Kathmandu, Nepal) on United's website.
Any itinerary with KTM as the destination immediately returns "We couldn't find a flight but we can still help" error screen.
As experiments, I tried more direct routings like EWR-KTM, EWR-DEL-KTM, ORD-DEL-KTM, DEL-KTM, but all instantly come back with the same error page. All (US)-DEL searches came back as expected.

This is somewhat surprising to me since Air India partner serves DEL-KTM, and pseudo-partner Vistara also does (they have a UA codeshare agreement, but admittedly I believe the KTM flights are not in that group).

Called the premier desk and the agent was able to manually create the itinerary (using the Vistara flight numbers for DEL-KTM) I fed over the phone but said it would have to be sent to the rate desk. She said read some notes in the system about Air India being blocked because their system was a mess, but it sounded like she was talking about Award tickets. Said I would think about it and call back later.

(as an aside, after some more messing around, at this point I tried doing the "text conversation an agent" thing, biggest waste of an hour of my time ever, big regret).

A different agent this morning was able to do it manually without using the rate desk but she assumed the error was on my part (that I should use multi-city search), but I wanted to post this out there for curiosity to know what might be going on here.

So, conclusion is tickets successfully booked on one itinerary (separate confirmation number for Vistara DEL-KTM, $25 fee waived), but I was curious if I'm missing something here.

jsloan

Huh? What do you mean separate PNR for Vistara? That flight should appear on the same reservation as your DEN-DEL flights, but should show have a separate confirmation number for Vistara. Is that what you mean?

Regardless, this is just standard United.com nonsense. If you can get the itinerary to come back from Google Flights, they often provide a booking link to United that would have worked. Otherwise, when the website is acting like this, calling to book is the correct procedure. Waiving the $25 is standard if you explain that the flight couldn’t be booked online.

TheBagman

Yes, sorry for my word usage, same reservation (i.e. shows up as one trip in my account) but separate confirmation numbers.

It seemed extra odd to me that an entire city was missing from the system.

Thanks, I've had my fair share of oddities with the current website but I haven't flown heavily since covid and hadn't reset my website expectations this low since the old .bomb site.

Just wanted to follow up a second time and share that on the first try using this method, I got the full itinerary to come up exactly as expected and at the expected fare class/price with a UA link that appeared to work.
Thanks again.

mduell

I swear there was another thread about this from maybe a couple years ago (certainly pre-COVID) but I can't find it now.

edit: Oh, I was thinking of Award ticket to Khartoum (KRT) wrong airport!