So, the MileagePlus Upgrade Award is showing R space?

Maybe this isn't the end of the world, then?

With this "feature" it takes 3x longer to find flights than with EF, but, still, a fraction of what it would take to call and sit on hold with idiots who don't know anything about their own systems for hours on end.

As for the jumping, yes, they've cut the "alert-call" jump routine (which, incidentally, is the **ONLY** way I've ever gotten an upgrade since $mi$ek destroyed the airline), but now all of us sit there and watch our seats disappear from people who happen to book when R opens or happen to call and check at the right time.

If the damn system just worked, this wouldn't be an issue, but as they won't fix it, because their true intention is to eliminate GPU and shift to a pure TOD model, they've now made GPUs worth nothing.

I'm no UA Apologist, far from it actually...

I hate to say it but I have to side with United here if there's leeches out there making money off information that was freely provided by United and it was being manipulated by its' own customers as well. On one hand you have the UA Customers who are given this information and trying to take advantage of the system by gaming for Upgrades, SDCs, and et cetera and then on the other hand you have companies like KVS and EF taking advantage of this and distributing this data for a cost when it's United who is paying for this distribution of data and getting nothing in return.

While I do appreciate free tools such as WATT, it's clear United is trying to control the revenue environment by trimming the costs that it does not have to burden itself with. It still sucks as an 1K when I want to search for flights with R available.

Yep -- that's what we need to do as a group. That'll overwhelm them.

It's gonna take that to do the kind of searching I do for flights...

Ditto. It is a mind boggling stupid decision to remove this information from folks who have come to rely on it in making booking decisions.

You're like a dog with a bone about this. I don't think it's helping anyone here to speculate about things which you have no evidence to support, and even less so cross-posting your speculation on different threads.

Airlines are all about display parity. It was a big deal with fares about 5-10 years ago when new GDS contracts where negotiated. If UA doesn't want the upgrade information on their website, then they wouldn't want it anywhere else, regardless of it was previously allowed or not.

Can't disagree with you enough here - no, it's not the reason they made the change, but the ability to sell more TODs is certainly a nice by-product of the decision.

Waitlisted upgrades don't magically clear when the now invisible R space opens? Oops, our (UA's) bad, sorry. And now CPU is a total crapshoot. Guess there are just more seats inside T-24 to sell at rock bottom advance F buy-up prices.

Hi njcommodore, I was going to post just this as a reminder this morning, but, you've beaten me to it. I don't expect everyone here will believe me, but, the intent was not to take away the ability to see if upgrade space is available or not when purchasing. This is valuable information. Checking the "MileagePlus Upgrade Award" box on the advance search page isn't the most intuitive way we can do this, but, it is the current way to get to this information when booking.

Shannon

If you click advanced search, then submit the search it will ask you which segments you want the upgrade on using miles. Click all segments and submit the search. You will notice that the results will display either as "upgrade not available" or as "United First (R)". So the system does give you this cumbersome backdoor to R space -- and I think by varying the number of travelers on your search you can also deduce how much "R" space there is. When you go to buy the tickets it offers the price in money plus miles for the upgrade.

It didn't offer me the option of using instrument upgrades. I am currently out of instrument upgrades -- I am sitting at 99,950 PQM's for the year, flying other carriers to delay getting the next batch of instruments so I can get a later expiration next year. So I don't know whether it is not offering me the option of instrument upgrades simply because I don't have any to use at the moment.

This is the same head-in-the-sand attitude that the record labels had, and then the movie studios. They thought they should try to stop internet distribution rather than trying to capitalize it and do it themselves.

If third party companies are using united's site and adding features to make it useful to passengers, the solution is to add functionality to the united.com site, not break the third parties.

The latter approach will never work and will only upset people.

UA Fails Management 101 yet again!!

This post indicates that a travel consolidator did have access to non-revenue inventory but this access was terminated, date as of yet unknown, and the poster suggested they subscribe to EF to gather such information, which they did. This indicates to me that there was non-revenue inventory available until some recent date on the GDS/CRS. It also indicates that EF apparently was gaining their data by means other than the GDS/CRS the travel consolidator was accessing.

As I once was able to peer over my travel agent's shoulder as she booked award tickets from some non-sensical (to me) gibberish on a green CRT screen, I considered the option worth considering. She did mention things like 'upgrade inventory' but that was all alien to me back then.

If it turns out there are no options to address this issue, that's an answer. IMO, the issue is too young to currently jump to that conclusion.

That's exactly my plan too- except I've already switched all revenue to AA. They are AAmazing! :-)

Yep, I dislike companies that mislead on a continual basis, I've never given a penny to EF or KVS because they don't even admit the screen scrape, at least admit your tactics and that you are charging for info that is freely available, but in a more useful interface (in some opinions)

Even till today EF is misleading people saying 'various channels' when it was ONE channel, ONE SINGLE channel that displayed this info.

I agree with you, I would rather get the information firsthand from United than through third party channels and vendors. Hell here's an idea for United...

UA Insider, could you send Hilfman or Bergsrud this idea... Monetize the Expert Mode and charge your customers $24.99 an annual fee or something so UA gets the incremental revenue that it's been looking for and make it free for 1Ks and offer differential pricing to your MileagePlus Elites & Members.

We wouldn't need to pay (not that I do) companies like KVS & EF for data that can be easily provided by United at a reasonable cost.

;)

I very clearly said revenue inventory is still available on EF.