Errors in award availability on United.com: phantom space and the reverse
 

I have seen phantom availability on united.com for LH flights. Others have commented on it as well. I'll see availability on LH F but it cannot be booked. Agents do not see it, and awards can't be taken thru to booking on the online.

Yesterday and today, I have seen the reverse: united.com is not showing availability when it is actually there. This is on United metal, when you would hope that United.com would show the correct availability.

I have an award booking using bmi miles. When I booked it, all I could find was EWR-IAH-SAN when actually I wanted EWR-SAN. I set up Expert Flyer for the nonstop flights, looking for I inventory. I could also see it on united.com. I needed to wait for the bmi call center to open. By the time that it did, I could no longer see the award space. I set up the Expert Flyer alert again. It went off again. United.com continued to show no availability. I looked at the award tool on ANA.com and found one seat shown. I called bmi, who also saw the award seat and reissued my ticket.

It's frustrating enough when they show award space that isn't there, but it seems to me to be an even greater issue when they fail to show their own award space.

Interesting because I've been tracking LH F space ever since LH downgraded my original award from F to C (3-class to 2-class aircraft on the second flight of the day FRA-BOS) a couple of weeks ago and would not protect me on the earlier 744 flight, or any other that day to the east coast. The CO/UA award site keeps showing there is F award space on the earlier flight, as well as one from FRA-IAD, my preferred alternative (April 7th) but Aeroplan's agents and website don't see either of these flights (though online, AE shows the FRA-BOS flight if I book FRA-BOS-PHL but the agents can't see that combo either!). Most curious. At the moment the only F space AE can get me across the Atlantic is on UA where just about every flight from every city in Europe has open award F space, so at the moment I am stuck on UA in F between FRA-IAD and into YYZ. So looks like no FCT for me at FRA, but I may finally be able to get into the UA FCL at IAD while waiting for my IAD-YYZ flight.

Hi SanDiego1K

This might be a very good issue to PM UAInsider about. Put a title in your message indicating the problem and mark urgent. UAInsider will forward the information to the IT people. UAInsider has been asking for specific examples from FTers so they can be investigated.

IT people may already be aware of the problem, but perhaps not. It seems like the IT people were unaware of a lot of things when they sped into this arbitrary deadline of March 3, imposed upon all the lower line employees by those in upper management who won out with their idea to switch to SHARES quickly, with inadequate preparation in many areas of the airlines.

This has existed long before the merging of the res system. I identified these LH issues two months ago.

UA MP Agent says certain award LH flights are not available but UA.com shows avail.
 

Folks, wandering over from the AA side so forgive me if this is already well know. I was helping some friends use their UA MP miles but had to book on the phone via an agent since UA.com couldn’t handle the full routing on line.

The UA MP agents (both in the US and Philippines) office said the following flights were not available:
• Sat. Jan 18, 2014: LH 413 depart EWR 825pm and arrive MUC 1030am next day
• Sat. Jan 18, 2014: LH 405 depart JFK 405pm and arrive FRA 12:10pm next day

We played the game of are you sure the flight exists, are you sure it is not UA or SQ metal, agent says let me go on Lufthansa’s web site to check, and once they confirmed the flights exist they still couldn’t book it. I even spoke to supervisors both times.

While this is going on I can see the Saver award space on UA.com for both the flights but I just can't book the entire 1 way without the UA.com software giving me an error because the routing (2 connections in this case) is too complex for the software.

I finally got transferred to someone in UA web support and she was able to help book the flights as I wanted and all turned out well.

Is this remnants of *Net blocking that UA used to do? Is this pretty normal and is the web support desk the best way to deal with it if it happen in the future. Just want to know for next time so I don’t have to waste 3-4 hours gain with the normal MP agents.

Thanks, in advance!

-miles

What cabin are you looking for? If F then .bomb is known to show "phantom availability" for LH F.

LH only releases F seats to its partners within 14 days of departure, so even if you see availability online, it's not bookable.

If you are looking at another cabin, then I can't offer any advice. Sorry.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_1_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10B318 Safari/8536.25)

Look up "phantom LH availability".

Long known problem


http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...-recently.html

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...e-reverse.html

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...nited-com.html

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...ilability.html

All, thanks for the pointers to the other threads.

Sorry, I forgot to specify it is economy class (not J or F) availability all the way through. I know about the T-14 days for F seats.

In this case the award availability is real because you can book it on UA.com/I was able to get booked in X class.

How long will this fiasco continue? You'd think after a number of years of showing Phantom F space on LH there would have been a fix. It is very frustrating to do a search from anywhere in Europe and find while no other premium award space is available, there are dozens of LH F options which we know are not real. Can't UA get this thing fixed? Surely this must take up much agent time and take them away from productive phone calls that earn UA money rather than animosity?!