UA Fan

Less payments to BR. It was the basis for the infamous starnet blocking employed by the old UA.

star_world

Those days (and that management team) are thankfully long gone. There isn't a hint of that going on now.

Are you saying that it's a likely scenario that UA would just limit BR flights, out of all of the *A partners, to make less payments to them? Or is it more likely that, as a new partner, there were some issues with how the flights were being displayed on the website and they need to be fixed?

UA Fan

The data during those days are still available. It is just a matter of time before the new UA takes another quick look at that. If it was major cost saver, I can see them trying it out. There is less competition, especially within Star Alliance in the North America once US leaves.

The airline industry is capable of shocking us. I was stunned when UA changed their date change policy on awards. The old and new UA were very favorable in that regard and were moving more and more to becoming the most generous in that aspect untill they made a full 180.

In short, I won't be surprised at anything they pull of now. With respect to BR, it is possible they realized that there was a surge of bookings on BR as they just became members and had lots of availability, thus resulting in a huge net payment towards them. Maybe the current situation is that with most partners, there is no net payment towards the partner or if there is, it may be a small one.

pete4212

Great, can the same fix be applied to LH First award inventory?

UA-NYC

Yup - I was tracking JFK-TPE-JFK space in Aug, as noted upthread. Went from C availability virtually every day to none at all. Did the calendar flipping from June to July magically zap out that space? I have my doubts.

UA Fan

True. It could also mean that lots of other Star Alliance members redeemed awards.

loyalStarwoodfan

Thanks for the heads-up and quick update. I look forward to the return of EVA availability displaying on united.com.

In the meantime, can someone on the web team please fix TSA (Taipei Songshan) as a valid airport/destination? It broke along with the EVA availability being pulled. This airport is also served by other Star Alliance partners including NH and CA. Award availability on routes like HND-TSA and SHA-TSA among others are no longer showing even though they are available. In fact, this has been an on-and-off bug on united.com over the past several months. Perhaps it's a separate issue that needs to be addressed. It would be greatly appreciated especially with the loss of service on UA metal to the Taipei metro area.

arfaczar

After reading UA Insider's posts, I'm thankful that I completed my award reservation using UA miles on July 1st before UA pulled the inventory. They had mid-Dec availability for SFO-TPE-BKK in economy saver and mid-Jan availability for DPS-TPE-SFO business saver.

Looking forward to the TPE-SFO sector in the new Royal Laurel Class.

Cheers,
A_Czar

erik123

This was a glitch I bet.

The award inventory fare class must have been misaligned for a short time as BR joined Star Alliance on 16 June and they re-aligning fare classes not to long ago.

BR is also missing from EF award search from today.

Traveling2

There is other goofy technical stuff happening here. Yesterday morning I was going to change my daughter's *A booking TPE-LAX to a direct flight on EVA. EVA was showing then. Unfortunately, I had to contact her about times and when I came back EVA was gone.

What was strange was that now the the other *A carriers were showing up at 115,000 miles for Economy award and 235,000 for Business -- when use the Change Flight page. Which is simply ridiculous. Trying to do a 2nd direct booking came up with the appropriate number of miles (32,500 for Saver Economy). The Change Flight miles -- which should be 0 -- is still showing up as a ridiculous number now.

greendx

When did ET J disappear? I saw some either earlier today or last night.

star_world

I see plenty of ET J now.

username

When I checked this about 24 hours ago, I was able to find availability TSA-HND and TSA-SHA on united.com So, it was fixed.

A while back, it did not take TSA. Then it did but could not find any flights. Then it was working like 24 hours ago and showing BR, CA and NH nonstops.

sbm12

While BR did adjust their inventory with the changeover they control it and they are publishing the information into StarNet. Other partners still see the space so the change isn't one on the BR side. UA flipped the switch on and then flipped it off. And in a week or so they'll flip it on again.

And where do you think EF gets the data from??

Correct. It is still bookable. You just have to call it in.

erik123

UA showed 4+ awards for months (on JFK-TPE in my case) while BR seems to only 4 seats at a time in business - so it looked like a mistake to me. Other award engines did not show similar availability when I checked. UA must have coded awards as a D or Z instead of an I fare is my guess when they loaded it into the system.

Does EF pull BR from UA? I remember seeing BR awards on EF 2 weeks ago.