For over a week I have been trying a combination of methods to get a fairly simple booking through but I'm not having any luck so I thought I would check if anyone could give me some pointers.

Basically I am trying to book a multiple destination award trip. I have only managed to pull the full itinerary up once, about two months ago. For the past week I have only been getting error messages and timeouts.

Ideally I am looking for NYC-JNB-NRT-SLC (but really it could be from/to anywhere in the US and anywhere in Japan) with about two weeks in JNB and NRT respectively. I can book every segment separately and there is plenty of availability and flight options, but as soon as I try to combine any of them (which I obviously need for the lower price) I get an error message, or it takes me to the calendar page but suddenly with zero availability.

Am I doing something wrong? Can I no longer to an Africa stop on the way to Japan? And if that's the case did the rules just change to disallow my type of routing? I have read every single fare rule document I could get my paws on and I cannot see why this shouldn't work.

I am lost, any insight is greatly appreciated, thank you.

I have found that the tool handles some things well - and other things, well, not so well...

Have the segments you want and give UA a call and put it together over the phone - its really your only option...

There are no published rules from UA on what award routings are permitted. I'm not sure what you've been reading, but odds are they aren't official docs from UA.

Search for the bits you want (e.g. NYC-JNB then JNB-NRT then NRT-SLC and then call it in. The agent will either be able to price it or they won't.

And I would not be at all surprised to learn that US-S. Africa is not valid via Asia or that US-Asia is not valid via S. Africa, essentially rendering the desired routing at the higher prices.

Thanks for all your insight, it looks like I will just have to give them a call (something I was trying to avoid).

And in regards to what I read... basically all the fine print to the mileage charts in the pdf docs, all the relevant threads on ft and most blogs I could find. A United CSR also told me a while back that award tickets basically have the same rules for stopovers, routing etc. as the regularly available lowest fare tickets for the same day (huh?), and while that sounds strange I still made sure to read all of those too, just in case.

Hate to break it to you, but none of that is authoritative for what the routing rules are.

I called UA yesterday to book a revenue ticket CDG SLC TLV - which wasn't bookable on the website too. Had a long discussion with the agent (who needed help from the fare desk), as to why the rules have become so complicated that no-one knows them - they can just try and then see what the computer says.

When something fails to price, or to ticket, or to revalidate - they often just have to guess what the problem is and try to fix it. Fundamentally, since the actual decision rules are hard coded in non-human readable form, the computer has no way to easily explain what the problem is. It's not just a poor computer system, but a problem with they way fares and rules are done in the industry today.

if you are plat or 1k with free award changes, try just booking any day that will ticket. Then after it tickets go in and change it for the flight you want and know was available on an individual search.

I booked a weird routing this way. One of the segments wouldn't show up in the multi-destination search, that I was able to see as a one-way. So I booked it with a date that worked then changed to to the one I wanted. (There was another one I tried this with, and it didnt work)

this might work, and if it doesn't you have free re-deposit as a plat/1k. If you do cancel, the flights you had booked might not be available right away after cancelling.

I'd be *highly* surprised if Africa was a valid stop on your way to Japan.

We already know that you can't even pass through South America on your way to South Africa (even when that is a shorter trip).

You can do this with combo of one-way and open-jaw award however.

I actually got it to work with the exact same routing back in December, but at that point I wasn't sure about my travel dates. Probably should have booked it anyway just to have it for a later change.

I'm only Gold this year but it's probably worth it anyway, thanks for the tip.

Even as a gold you have 24 hours to cancel... I think this applies to award travel. You should double-check that before trying! ;-)