Has someone noted yet that this execrable change dovetails nicely with fare-related restrictions on same day flight changes? It's so damned frustrating dealing with this airline right now.

EF has other useful features that I can probably justify the price of, namely seat alerts and revenue bucket access.

...and yet people keep flying UA (I do as well, but that's only because Doug Parker keeps rattling his saber... )

UA should put the bucket info back on the Preview site. To even see the site you have to have to be granted permission and login... and surely there are few if any users who could be considered novices. UA could monitor usage of the Preview site and disable any users who might be using those scripts they seems to dislike.

This wouldn't be a permanent solution but it could be a temporary fix for some of us... I know I could live with it until UA comes up with their final solution.

Sorry I haven't been following this thread in detail, but can anyone elaborate on the AC point above?

You probably missed her two updates (here and here) amidst the 1000+ replies.

I saw someone mention it in the AC forum just yesterday. I will try to search for the post & PM it to you. The OP of that post could have been wrong as I just looked quickly for it and don't see any big deal being made. (it's like the telephone game)

For any customer centric company, they would do anything to get customers engaged.

Yanking this feature will greatly decrease the engagement level of top customers, decrease the value of the website (hence direct traffic to competing website such as expedia and travelocity), greatly increase the (negative) contact rates as customers call with questions. Net net should be hugely $$ negative.

The only positive thing is that lack of transparency will reduce the chance of united being embarrassed for making stupid makes, and will provide cover to roll out sneaky "revenue enhancement" initiatives.

Great job for taking a giant leap backward.

I could use a little help translating the second message. It seemed like double speak.

And, unless you've personally sailed around the world, covering all of the surface of the oceans, to make sure you don't fall off the edge of the world anywhere, you cannot say conclusively that the world is round and not flat.

It's typical CO style double talk.

"enhancement" "changes you'll like"

Got it. Would be great if you could point me to it. Thanks!

my guess is that UA will come back with an annual/monthly fee for viewing fare buckets, this will weed out any issue with people misinterpreting information and add yet another rev stream for them

Terrible, terrible, terrible!
What good is the new UA thinking by doing this?
One more bad decision for one less good function.

I guess I'm one of those people who "misused" fare class because:

1) I used it to search for R availability, so that I could buy a pricier W ticket, and actually use my GPU's (some of them).

2) I get annoyed when I see high R availability, don't clear, and strongly suspect the upgrade was sold out under me for TOD's. But, wait, UA wants more transparency, so they are going to supply less information. Did I miss something here?

I control my own flight spending. Due to geographical location, I probably have to fly 50k miles on UA. Beyond that, it's up to me and I've been flying the additional 50k I fly each year on UA. But, make my upgrades and GPU's worthless, then I can look elsewhere. I'm not the only one saying this.

Is anyone listening?

For view fare buckets with an annual/monthly fee which is totally free before? I sincerely hope UA would not do this and hope UA could realize transparency is very important as they said!