syrahnose

I'm having same problem. get problem loading page error, and long time out. I'm using firefox, assuming Chrome has a problem now.

jasonvr

OK, first post has been updated with a better link to get the script at as well as installation instructions for Firefox and Chrome

JCBIII

Just used this tool to locate a close-in award - business class on an A380 to BKK, whoo-hoo! There were only two days with availability in all of November (one of which was not indicated on United's little color-coded calendar); this script made the tortuous search process much more bearable.

Kudos to the author for a useful little utility.

jasonvr

Congrats on the find! Happy that people continue finding this useful

jasonvr

Well, it looks like the old UA site is completely gone which means my script no longer works

It will take some time to figure out whether a new script can be coded to use the new site. The biggest pain is probably the fact that by default the results seem to be spread across multiple pages instead of all on one page. I don't know if there will be a simple way around that.

jasonvr

Well it's been a long hiatus, but I am working on a new version of this script to work with the new site. I just got too fed up with the calendar links not working 99% of the time to move thru dates quickly. I've already got the next/forward date buttons working as well as the scroll up/down. I have started working on removing the standard award columns as well. I can do it for the search results, but if you open the details things get messed up.

In general, the new site is a lot more dynamic which means more effort to get this working and doing things that are a lot more complicated than the old script.

Things I would like to put in the new script:

• Date navigation (already done)
• Removal of standard awards
• Sorting by award type (essentially clicking the award type column header)
• Concatenating all pages of results into a single page

The last one is what I'm working on now. I think I have a method to do it, but I don't know how long it will take to get working correctly.

If there are other suggestions on how to make the award searches easier, please post them here.

jasonvr

As promised, the first version of the script for the new site is available. It's fairly well tested and reuses a fair amount of tested code from the old script. Please give it a try and let me know if you have any problems or have suggestions. See the first post for information on how to install the new script

Items missing from this script that were in the old script

• Expansion of mixed cabin information
• Removal of rows when class filtering causes no available classes to be left

Known bugs

• Automatically scrolling past the calendar may not work if class sorting isn't enabled

Wishlist

• Items that were present in the old script but are now missing (see above)
• Concatenating all results across multiple pages into a single page

Note, for the last item in the wishlist, I can actually make the concatenation happen which is pretty cool, but once it happens, the details and seatmap expansions no longer work. If I can ever figure out how to get past that, It should be pretty easy to implement.

JCBIII

Hi Jasonvr -

Really glad to hear you're updating this tool. I was highly bummed out when United changed their format and broke it. Give me a few days to try it out and I'll get back to you with any thoughts (I'll have to re-figure out how to install greasemonkey on my new machine first...)

-J

Mama

You can search one way award tickets on United website and app. So I don't know what the purpose of your tool is.

jasonvr

I would first refer you to the first post to understand the general capabilities. The high level goal of the script is to separate the wheat from the chaff when searching for an award, particularly a premium cabin award.

Some examples:

1. Who wants to see standard awards at all, so get rid of those columns completely
2. Are you searching only for premium cabin awards? If so, get rid of the economy column completely
3. Searching for first class awards? Why not automatically sort the first class saver award column so that those awards appear at the top of the list
4. Looking to go somewhere specific, but don't have firm dates? Use the buttons in the upper right corner to quickly move thru the days in a month one at a time without having to use the calendar links

In the future, I also plan on adding in the capability to remove rows from the table if previous filtering (i.e. #1 and #2 above) have left a row that doesn't have any awards. Example: Row 10 of the table has only economy and standard awards available. You have filtered those out so now you are left with a row in the table that has only columns that say "Not Available". That's pretty useless, so just get rid of those rows completely.

seanp7

Thank you Jasonvr. My first test went well. Keep up the great work!

jasonvr

Small update

v1.1

• Fixed a bug where first class sorting was selected but no 3 class flights exist which caused script to exit prematurely

JCBIII

​
Hi, jasonvr. I've spent some time with your new tool ( V1.0). Nice. Some observations, in no particular order:

- Your yellow buttons in the URH corner sometimes get stuck behind United's blue table header row (XP sp3, Firefox 44.0.2)

- Suppressing Standard Economy awards would be a very desirable feature, as you note.

- While concatenating all pages onto one screen may be a nice feature, I always seem to be able to get all of the desirable flights to percolate to the first page using United's sorters (duration, stops, etc). Retaining Details and Seatmap expansion are more important to me than page concatenation.

- Possibly tighten up fonts, whitespace, etc to view more flights on-screen at one time?

- Also, as you've noted, expanding Mixed Cabin info would be nice.

Thank you for your work on this!

John

jasonvr

Thank you for the feedback. Regarding your items above:

1) I haven't seen them get stuck behind. I primarily test on Firefox, but under Win 8.1. I don't think I have XP around anymore. I think I have a Win 7 VM that I could try it on. I might have an old laptop that was still running XP or I might have an XP install disk that I can make a VM out of...

2) Yeah, suppressing economy standard as well is something I haven't looked at. Now that I've looked more closely, I think it is doable. Since they are interleaved, it's not quite as easy as simply deleting a column like for J and F standard awards, but the Saver awards do have an indication that they are Saver, so I should be able to key off that. I'd probably blank out the cell and put in wording that just says "Standard Award", or maybe mimic their "Not Available" text

3) Concatenating is turning out to just be a bear, so I may abandon it. I too find that in general you can get everything you want onto one page. There are some rare exceptions. Details are definitely an important thing so that you can see what is actually being booked. I wonder if it might be helpful to pull some critical information out of the collapsed details pane so that it is always visible without expanding the details. Something like the flight numbers and routes involved (i.e. UA123 LAX-SFO/LH931 SFO-FRA).

4) Not sure about this one, but I can investigate. You could zoom out on your browser to see more, but it will shrink the font.

5) I need to figure out whether this information is even present in the page. It might be script driven in which case it will be difficult. On the old site it was a tooltip so I could easily extract the text. With new site it is some sort of popup and the info might not even be present until you hover over the icon.

jasonvr

New release is available

2.0 - 3/5/2016

• Filtering standard awards also works for economy awards now.
• If, after filtering, there are no awards left in a row, the row will be removed

Also, I have investigated the expansion of the mixed class info and it's not going to be easy. For the techies out there, here are the details:

Hovering over the Mixed Cabin indication now fires off a script that causes an entirely new div element to be added to the document. When the mouse leaves, the div element is deleted. I have tried something simple to mimic the hover, but it didn't work. I was able to programatically click on the Mixed Cabin notification and that caused the popup to appear, but couldn't get it to go away afterwards. If I can figure out how to make the new div element appear and disappear and extract the information from it in between, it should be possible, but first part is the hard part.

For the non-techies:
Unlike the old site, the mixed cabin information isn't present for me to extract until you hover over it. That makes things hard, though possibly not impossible.