From my perspective, this is a perfect illustration of the problem.

I guess there are just two of us (me and you) who have experienced this. The other 90 million flyers are thankfully having no problems.

I am trying to SDC to a later flight (original 11am, try to change to 5pm one). Seems all the G-spaces are drying up! But the lowest the fare I could force UA to search is in K. Does this have anything to do with the "expert mode" changes?

Exactly.

This COdbaUA regime is beyond repair.

probably not -- just that UA is sold out or no longer offering a G fare for those flights. G is a deeply discounted economy fares that is regularly not offered for many flights.

Not always. I had an IAD-MEX flight this past Monday. Because I had a new passport, I couldn't check in at home, therefore, I couldn't see my waitlist status on the PDA site. When I called the 1K desk to see if they could check me in with my new passport information, even they couldn't do it - Mr. Chicken was, as usual, in charge.

The revenue bucket info was no greater than what you'd get through a GDS. They only publish numbers up to 7 (or was it 9?). The actual total inventory available in each bucket is only available internally. I imagine the reservation agents have it but they are definitely not supposed to give out the actual numbers.

Same situation here. Tickets for November (booked Dec 30, 2011) will be the last $ I give the current UA. Of course, I have a GPU waitlisted on the flights. Nice. Not holding my breath.

And the chase Club card will be cancelled mid December. I have the date to call marked on my calendar - jus prior to the posting of the annual fee.

What's next
 

Will they now disable check upgrade availability as well as search by fare type?

I too have an experience a few minutes ago - I was blind on my flight tomorrow (no R/RN availabity access) till I used the old fashinon way to find availability (what a pain in the @$$). So I am #7 on waitlist - not good. 5 family with instrument upgrade. Then R class opens up. I try to change online but only offer $$$ and would not take SWU/Regional upgrade - damn $mi$ek/J. So I call 1K line and it was done using my SWU - I have tons of SWU that is expiring in a month - might as well use it for I have no use for them...

Does it have to be this hard?!?. God...

UA - if you are reading this - fix this!

I don't think anything else is gained either. Assuming masa9 is booking more than a few days (and probably more than a few weeks) in advance of the flight, the fare class inventory at the time of booking is highly unlikely to have any bearing on what the fare class inventory will be at the time s/he wants to do SDC. And the chances that buying up to that next fare class will mean the difference between being able to do SDC and not being able to do SDC are incredibly small.

But if masa9 wants that (faux) peace of mind, s/he can get an ExpertFlyer subscription, which will show all the revenue inventory buckets, as well as the fare listings so you'll know what the "next higher" available fare is. And as a bonus, you can set alerts to notify you when a particular inventory class becomes available, AND when a particular inventory class falls below a specified threshhold. Potentially very useful info.

I've been keeping up with this thread pretty well, and I really haven't seen many, if any, legitimate situations where UA's change prevents them from doing XYZ. Lots of (absurd) complaints from people who claim they're now going to have to spend hours on the phone with a reservation agent to find a flight that they can confirm a GPU/RPU on. Newsflash (for the fourteenth time!), you can still see if flights have "R" availability or not during the search process! It's maybe 2 extra clicks. Big effing whoop.

And if you need to see revenue inventory, because it's that important to you, suck it up and pay for ExpertFlyer or KVS, or I think there may even be a free site. EF is much better than UA was for revenue buckets anyway, because you can see multiple days on one screen, and you can filter results for a particular class.

-1 Not particularly. Poorly researched as well.

How about, "I now have to manually check R space multiple times per day as I no longer get UA upgrade/award alerts from EF, especially since UA's flaky systems are known for not processing waitlists automatically, and checking for upgrade space generally now is now much more tedious on KVS." Is that "legitimate" enough?

:rolleyes:

I have looked at these boards many times. This one prompted me to write... the bottom line United continues to disregard it's customers, in particular those who are the most loyal. Clearly, this issues and most others are the outcome of the disconnect between Senior Management and the customers.
Most front line people, both in the States and around the world, continually say the same thing " please write to management as they do not listen to us"! The only group that I have not heard continually say this is Reservations... in my experience this is one of the areas, after Senior Management, that needs to significantly improve. It is really a shame for an airline to be providing such a poor customer service experience!

while technically correct (I have posted the alternative method a couple of times myself). The workaround just provides an yes/no answer and the lack of a numeric value of award seats / upgrades is a significant reduction of information - which might be used to determine urgency (acknowledging inventory can be withdrawn at any time).

However, this thread is much more than about this feature deletion. The frustration and irritation of many of the responses shows a very hostile UA-customer relationship. And by the number on non-regular posters -- runs fairly deep in the FT community (include a significant number of new posters) -- not just the regular posters. There have been a series of mis-steps, customer unfriendly actions by UA and this feature deletion has torched the simmer discontentment of the community. This should be a big red flag for UA. Earlier I posted about the communication failures of this announcement.

So is some of this is a bit irrational, yes -- but there is a reason / history that has lead to this.

The ONLY irrational thing is any defense of COdbaUA in this issue