nycr

Anyone know if UA is still practicing star net blocking? Is CO? Is it worth moving miles from UA to CO to get better availability?

rankourabu

No - but you still have a crap online booking engine - and poorly trained agents
No - never did
No - same availability - except with CO you also get Virgin Atlantic online, but the CO booking engine is light years ahead - almost all partners (except TK,CA,LX), United.com, just plain sucks.

mccullo3

I have moved 100k in miles over to my continental account just because they show availability on partners that United does not. Example -- SFO-DTW on 11/23 return 11/27. You do the search under Star Alliance partners on united.com and nothing shows up -- even when looking for first class.

On continental.com it shows many US Airways options in 1st for the standard 50k in miles

I would call that Star Blocking... even if you want to call it a crappy search engine!

Ready4Snow

Who said airlines wanted to make it easy to use those miles on other carriers

Cheerfulflyer

Actually, it seems that CO is doing some starnet blocking too. Availability on LX as given by expertflyer just don't seem to appear on CO's online or phone agent system. This was a ZRH-SFO redemption.

mduell

Yes AFAIK.

IIRC EF uses M&M availablitity for LH/LX, which is better than *A availability.

abcx

What he said. Forget about booking ZRH-SFO in C/F except last minute.

BryanIAH

CO.com doesn't show LX availability.

Renard

I would say that the aeroplan website would be a better place to check LX award availability.

Carolinian

It is the partner inventory that is blocked in *Net blocking, and this is a huge issue for those of us who travel TATL and mostly beyond the gateways. We have to have partner inventory for the segments beyond the gateway. If the new UA follows UA rather than CO in this area, that will be a big encouragement for people like me to bail out to another program.

I recently booked an award ticket for a relative on UA, with possible *A connections to the final destination through MUC (LH), VIE (OS), or IST (TK). The agent checked MUC and VIE each for a week and found no inventory either way and said nothing was availible. I had to point out that IST was also an option, and she did find seats on TK. Since I have always been able to book award seats on LH to MUC and OS to VIE on the days I wanted with no problem using my BMI Diamond Club account, I was surprised at entire weeks not availible using UA, so I suspected *Net blocking. So I called BMI DC to check availibllity of those flights, giving them my prefered two days each week each way on both the MUC and VIE flights. Each day on all flights were availible through BMI. Clearly this was *Net blocking by UA on these flights, and it is a bad sign that UA is still screwing customers this way.

spgaston

So if I understand correctly we better book our awards through CO before the programs are merged.

sbm12

In addition to the differences highlighted above about the selections available online, it is also worth noting that the routing rules between the two are rather different. There are a few cases where this can lead to significant savings and more options when booking via CO rather than UA.

dayone

Many signs point to the CO system being the post-merger platform.

spgaston

Doesn't mean they won't adopt *net blocking or UAs routing limits.

rankourabu

If they do, it will be very very obvious, if its available to ANA/Aeroplan, and not on newunited.com.... it will just be too obvious.