Doesn't always work. I have personally seen cases where flights will have the Red Text saying Mileage Upgrade not available, but when you click the old fare class link, it shows R>0 and RN>0.

Wow. I do not understand how you can think that this is a "change we are going to like" or that we aren't going to see what this is actually about. If the raw and actual data is making your company look bad because what it says and what you promise don't combine to produce predictable results, the solution that demonstrates a "great appreciation" for transparency is not to try and hide the information that proves something is wrong. The way to make this right would be to FIX THE PROBLEM so that the promises you make produce the outcomes you promise when the conditions are right. Hiding the information that allows us to know what the conditions are, and therefore whether or not promises are being kept, is not transparency. It's asking us to trust you. We do not.

Basically, what this tells me is that either the system is so wrong that the information you are giving us is not accurate or that you simply do not trust us as knowledgeable customers. :td::td: Either one isn't good.

Unbelivable!
 

Wow,
What a way to upset your most loyal customers--the ones who do understand the different fare buckets because we fly lots to keep our 1K status and are multi-million mile flyers.

I doubt it does any good to complain, but this was a terrible mistake. Until you have a new system read and tested you should not take away the ability to see how full a flight is and whether or not it has upgrade space.

I can't imagine the hours that now have to be spent on the telephone with an agent to do what easily could be done on the computer.

I have not read through the 900+ posts here this weekend, and perhaps there was a real competitive reason for doing this, but it does not seem transparent.

I don't really know. And I'm not sure why it matters.

Who cares whose "fault" it is? But I do tend to agree with you. They gave 25K fliers free access to E+ initially, and so they felt entitled to that. They gave 25k fliers reasonably frequent upgrades, and they became entitled to that too. Well, the game has changed and the airlines (not just UA) have figured out that a 25k flier isn't necessarily that valuable, particularly when they're sucking up all the benefits at the expense of the (late-booking) 1Ks (who end up in E- middle seats).

So after 60+ pages, just about all the points I wanted to make have already been made. FWIW, I agree with:

1. If scraping was the main problem, they could have solved it with legal and/or technical countermeasures. (And I say that as an IT security professional).

2. Since revenue/award fare buckets are still available in multiple locations, the only thing this leaves are upgrade buckets as the reason for the change.

3. Thus, this represents a push by UA to turn upgrades into a true 'blackbox', even though their own publicly stated processes and procedures still aren't working correctly.

In any case, the one potentially new item I have to add to the discussion here is that I think this demonstrates a major mistake of UA when they re-did their fare classes / ff program ahead of the merger in making instrument/miles+$ supported upgrades clear into the same buckets as complimentary upgrades. If UA did as AA has done and had one bucket for supported confirmed upgrades (say R) and another for complimentary upgrades (say FU ;-) (thanks KVS)), they could have taken a much more nuanced approach here. I think it's perfectly reasonable for a consumer to make inquiries such as 'can my confirmable upgrade confirm at booking?' (and remember, UA is the one who has given them the ability to do this, be it CR1, SWU, Miles, etc), and removing that ability to see this when it was present before is quite frustrating. Removing the ability to see CPU inventory would be unfortunate considering the process problems they've had, but coupled with removing everything else, it's just downright indefensible.

Huh? Knowing whether a flight is C9 D9 Z9 or C1 D0 Z0 is not useful to you before you book a long haul that you are looking to upgrade? Are you suggesting that the above is not helpful in figuring the odds of the upgrade clearing?

United Airlines - STOP the insanity!

This is another bad decision

As a data point, today I tried to book a BKK-NRT roundtrip.

Simple search by price $570

Search for W-class 'sorry seats are not available'

Hard to understand why L-class is open but W-class is not.

Shannon, we cannot even book a flight in a specific class anymore? Is this an attempt to prevent even the opportunity to use a GPU?

Is my query paranoid? Ridiculous?

Please ask yourself why this 10 year 1K is asking these questions. That might help everyone here...

I don't think it is a wise move. We want to see real "improve" after UA's merger!!!

I've been working and traveling and missed this thread.

This is a moronic change. I am starting to think the real Smisek has been kidnapped and an impostor is running United. This shows a complete lack of understanding of the airline industry.

Poor Shannon - how can anyone be asked to post these changes...

Actually this is the kind of change that makes me confident that the real Smisek is still in charge, because he routinely shows a complete lack of understanding of the airline industry.

I guess I may have missed this...but what was the "one new feature" added in this release?

obviously DISLIKE!

...but hmmmm, the data must still be available from somewhere else - from another engine somewhere used by the travel industry. ITA matrix have it?

I'm sure someone here will discover a hack to get the inventory buckets from somewhere else I imagine? c'mon, folks...

Apparently a fairly useless feature .. Itineraries will now show upgrade requested/waitlisted/confirmed as per the old .bomb website.

There is a "MileagePlus Upgrade Award" box to tick under advanced search. This will return flights with R availability, so the info can be recovered... it is just so much more time consuming.

This is really the aspect of the change that I do not understand... the information has not been hidden, it is just harder and more time consuming to gather. Especially that on the regular fare buckets, which I was consulting regularly for my purchases. Now I have either to pay for EF/KVS or go to flightstats.com. Really, really annoying.

That was already in the old version..it's not new...