This is ridiculous. I'm going back to flying my Gulfstream on a more regular basis.

One customer unfriendly decision after another lately. Heading to JFK to fly AA doesn't sound so bad these days...

I would venture to guess that more passengers prefer JFK to EWR. Not necessarily CO flyers as CO was marketed to EWR passengers but just looking at numbers, JFK serves more people then the dreaded EWR

The "My Dates are Flexible" along with the "Mileageplus Upgrade Awards" option provides a monthly matrix, if the inventory is available , the date will be highlighted.

It doesn't show upgrade inventory, only prices.

That's not what I meant. What I meant is this. If I need to buy 8 tix, I could buy them all on one reservation, but if I do, I will not receive the lowest available fare if there are fewer than 8 seats available in that bucket. If I can see that there are only 6 tickets at the lowest fare, I know to book 6 tickets on one PNR, and then book the other 2 tickets on another PNR. For the trip from which I just returned I purchased 10 tickets on 4 records. The first ticket was $343.40 (L/G), the next 7 were $383.40 (L/K), the next was $408.40 (L/L), and the final ticket was $438.40 (L/T)

Now, in order to achieve the same thing, I have to do my initial search for a single ticket so as not to miss any low fares and check for the "X tickets remain at this price" notation to figure out how many to book in my first transaction. This is okay, but it it does not give me any idea of how many tickets are available in the next fare bucket, so it is hard to predict how many transactions the booking will take. It also leaves me much less able to guess how much more the last PNR I book will cost than the first.

I'm suggesting that you're still making a bet based on, at best, a partial set of data and that pretending it is conclusive is delusional.
I believe that this was a part of the issues the call center was faced with. That said, there were definitely some issues over the weekend with the website (and ITA, which is the pricing engine the website uses) not always showing the cheapest fare for a search. That's bad.


Search for one and see if you get the "Only N available at this price" alert. Should be faster than going one-by-one through the inventory numbers.

The "My Dates are Flexible" option along with the "Mileageplus Upgrade Awards" option should show you a highlighted date in a monthly matrix format if the upgrade inventory is available.

I'm pretty sure that's exactly what I said.

The problem is that while this method tells me how many tickets are available at the lowest fare, it does not tell me how many are available in the next lowest fare, and the fare after that, etc. I am usually buying more tickets than are available at the lowest price. It is helpful to me to know if I will be able to purchase all that I need within two or three fare buckets, or if my final few tickets will be in buckets that are likely to bring the total price outside of the range that we can afford. I realize that I cannot know with certainty how much the ticket price will increase with each jump in fare bucket, but it is reasonably predictable.

Your statment is getting weirder. No one ever suggested or pretended the info is conclusive. It has been used by me and I am sure many others as a way to guess our chances of clearing an upgrade. I have no illusion of what the data mean and not sure where you get the illusion that we don't know it.

The reality
 

As a long time FF on many different airlines over the last 30 years, I have always searched (and only sometimes found) booking class specific availability. The UA fare bucket display was a great boon, compared to what most (non USA) airlines offer.

On the other hand, as a former IT person I well understand what screen scraping does to a website - in terms of cost and performance.

There are technological solutions, but they are not as trivial to implement as some people here seem to think.

Let's focus - ask UA to restore ASAP some way of getting this information - only when logged on to an active/elite account - this seems to be the simplest reasonable control.

Also, I haven't seen anyone point out that elites looking for an upgrade and booking a flight where premium classes have lots of space is not necessarily a bad thing for UA. It seems to me that this might even have a positive impact overall on load factors.

Your statment is getting weirder.

CO wants us to be in the dark. You too? :confused:

I decided to give UA this year to see how the merger shakes out. Even though I haven't had any major problems, this decision is pushing me to find another airline, although an AA merger with US could be worse.

The biggest act of stupidity here was not running this by a confidential group of FTers BEFORE implementation. There are quite a few members that have access to Shannon/Scott/etc. A simple "what will happen if we do this" question to about a dozen FTers (perhaps with a non-disclosure clause) may well have prevented this nightmare.

Everytime UA (or CO) has gone off and done something without first evaluating the effects on and the responses of their most loyal customers, it has resulted in a ton of unintended consequences. Or perhaps, SOMEBODY does not care............................

Maybe they'll reverse this change like when they decided not to shrink the world earlier this year.