UA award booking,change questions/fees/issues/routing/excursionist problems {Archive}
 

Hi everyone,

A heads up that we have some updates regarding award travel coming to the MileagePlus program effective October 6, 2016. We’re always looking for ways to make our program easier to navigate and booking multi-city itineraries is something our customers have been asking that we improve. At a high level, this includes enhancements to booking multi-city MileagePlus award travel and streamlined change/redeposit fees. Additional highlights below for visibility:

The most up-to-date information, including FAQs can be found at www.mileageplusupdates.com.

Thank you,

-UA Insider

Wow is about all i can say. Sounds like UA can't be bothered fixing their pathetic website so to allow users to book multi-city awards they have to use more miles and book them all as one-ways. With the "one free award ticket within a multi-city award" I suppose there are ways to come up with cheaper options but they will be few and far between?

Oh and look at those fees. Plats are not going to be happy about this at all. Golds and silvers also affected.

-RM

I think that this is a mixed bag for Golds. On the plus side, cancelling award flights will only cost $25 if you are 2 months out and only $60 inside 2 months (down from $100 anytime). On the minus side, inside 2 months you need to pay more for changes and all changes incur a fee. On balance, more downside than upside IMO

Huge loss for me - as a Plat, I lose the ability to book/cancel last-minute award tickets without fees. :(

(ps I have to book my stopover RT ticket asap before they charge me extra miles!)

Platinums lose out here. Whats the diffrence between Plat and Gold now? A few more upgrades?

Well Platinums best benefit is now gone. Nice work

I didn't realize it was a Friday afternoon...

61 days....geez....will this mean that better reward availability be opened up before then?....why remove the 21 day rule?

Will the system price correctly when valid routings are inputted without stopover?
For example, USA to Australia awards (40k saver economy) allow routing via Asia.. but if you input USA-Asia one-way (35k saver economy), followed by Asia-Australia one-way 20k saver economy (assuming < 6 hrs between one-ways), will it price correctly?

It's unclear exactly how this is going to work. Note there is no mention of OJ. But they are making very clear that the stopover is going to be limited to same region.

Despite the uncertainty, it's a good bet these changes will result in a net increase in award pricing for many itineraries.

Yep. Really a low blow.

On the positive side, they've reduced the redeposit fee for GM to $125. That's a big deal.

Oof
 

Doesn't look so good. :(

Really hard not to be cynical regarding how UA treats its best travelers....

Another enhancement which takes away benefits.

Where is that pendulum - must be closer to swinging the other way!

This is what I'm concerned about. It was possible in the past to create some pretty complex OJ routings...

Another way to see this is copying AA of ~2011(?) and DL changes of 11/2014. UA has been notably more generous in award construction. Of course they want to 'fix' that.