aussieinsf

Flying MXP-EWR arriving into EWR at 1:45pm and wanting to overnight in NYC before flying home to SFO the next day. Economy, one way award. After multiple calls the best I can do in terms of routing is a 7am departure out of Newark the following day. There is award availability for the 1:30pm departure. That departure would be within the 24 hour allowable connection that I thought was a rule when connecting via a gateway city on a multi region award. The agents keep telling me the system will not allow that to be booked without collecting an extra 12,500 miles. I tell them about the 24 hour rule and the supervisor says the system won't allow it to be booked as it is "close to 24 hours" (other departures such as the 9am departure are also not being allowed but the 7am departure is). I've asked for the agent to look up the rule and am on an extended hold waiting for a response.

Is it possible United now has an unwritten 18 hour layover policy? (the 7am departure falls within 18 hours or so other rule that is preventing this). I've been able to ticket up to 24 hour connections as a single award as recently as earlier this year. I've tried calling twice with extended holds and supervisor intervention and had no luck. After the agent reached out to a third supervisor that supervisor agreed that allowing me to book the 7am but not the 1:30pm made no sense and she did a manual exchange and got me on the later flight.

The 24 hour connection is important to me as my wife and I often fly economy and she has a bad back so it's more comfortable for her to break up the journey with an overnight.

jsloan

findark

Put another way, the underlying rule (24 hours) has not changed. The ticket would still price if an agent assembled those segments and requested the computer to price it. But post October 2016, they have been instructed not to do this, and instead only to use the website to search for award itineraries. If your desired itinerary is not in the top 200 (?) "best" choices (according to the backend search prioritization), you will have immense difficulty booking it.

sexykitten7

I'm shocked they did that for you. Did your desired itin show up on .bomb?
Consider me doubly shocked.

I'm in a similar predicament; even after 2 schedule changes no one will ticket what I want! Welcome to the New Untied.

dvs7310

I've certainly had trouble getting just under 24 hour stopovers to come up in the search, even when I try to force a certain routing with the preferred airports function. Spoke to 2 different agents on the 1K line and they refused to manually adjust it. Finally gave up and booked a Skyteam award with Skymiles instead. I truly hate this recent UA policy of forcing us to use whatever comes up on the search engine and refusing otherwise valid manual routings.

jsloan

The preferred airports function is a post-search filter. It doesn't change the results that come back from the search.

username

They really over-did this. I wonder if the motivation was to reduce labor (so agents don't spend all day trying to find the routing for people) or because the feel people were gaming the system or both.

Yet, on some domestic trips, the computer returns huge > 4 hour connections that would price with 1 fare but 2 taxes (i.e. 12,500 one way + $11.20 instead of $5.60).

jsloan

My guess is that it was some of both. They probably audited the longest calls to the call center and found that (a) a lot of them referred to these super-intricate itineraries and (b) they were losing money on those flights anyway.

It feels like they used a rocket launcher to swat a fly, though. I think they could have gotten a similar result by adding a transfer limit on US-Europe and intra-Europe awards, similar to the one that existed on US-Asia awards. (US-Asia was 3 transfers on a one-way and four in each direction on a round-trip). The European awards had no transfer limit -- and given the number of *A airlines in Europe, a dedicated passenger could book quite the tour.

kittiyut

Yes, you'll probably have to use multi-city search to find it and the system will add up the mileage for each search. However, if you can get a helpful agent to help you issue the ticket, the mileage required can be reduced.

Here's an example of what I did for BKK-SFO via Tokyo in "O"

System Priced Segment by segment BKK-HND + NRT-SFO (arrive HND 10:30pm, depart NRT 5:00pm the next day) = 60K+110K = 170K - I wanted to break the journey and stay overnight in Tokyo.
Agent help = priced as normal BKK-SFO @ 140K miles

I certainly didn't have any difficulty at all, just had to wait for the agent to do her thing to get the ticket issued. She did have to work at it before the ticket could be issued, but "immense" difficulty? Not really.

Kacee

Yes, it can be incredibly difficult to find an agent who will manually book the desired itinerary using the old system. Most people just give up after multiple agents refuse.

If you were able to get an agent to do it for you, you were quite fortunate. (And while it certainly helps to be GS, many GS have reported being turned down.)

jmanirish

The 7am after a 1:45 arrival is not a bad backup. Since you’re only trying for economy (and EWR-SFO has a lot of capacity in Y), I’d book that and plan on changing once you board at MXP, or any time thereafter.

jsloan

Assuming OP's profile is accurate, at UA Plat (or even Gold) there would be no charge for this if saver economy space is available. As a data point, I currently see 2+ Saver Economy seats available on 6 of the 7 remaining nonstop flights for today and 12 of 13 for tomorrow. While there's never a guarantee that space will be available, this seems likely to be a better option than trying to fight with a phone agent.

Due to the overnight stay at EWR, any bags would only be checked to EWR anyway, meaning that this change can be made from the app without needing human intervention. Just pick any flight departing within 24 hours of the time you make the request -- so, if you want, e.g., the 5:15 PM Thursday departure, it should become available in the app at 5:15 PM Wednesday.

mduell

Yes, 24h international connections are allowed, subject to the opaque algorithm deciding it's in UA's best interest to offer them.

It recently offered me a 32h international connection, due to sub-daily flight frequency.

aussieinsf

Thanks for the advice and responses. Confirming that I was able to get ticketed on the 1:30pm departure as a single one way award (1K status so no change fee).

Agree with others that this approach by united is counterproductive. It ends up taking me an average of an hour on the phone with 1 or more agents to ticket what are valid single one-way award routings. It’s frustrating to me and the agents are perplexed and don’t have a good reason to turn you down when you politely press them.

Would be good if they fixed the IT behind this so you could choose all valid available award routings without agent intervention.

Sykes

Just another data point: on March 30th I was able to get an agent to manually price a long connection (~11 hours) in Taipei on an award with EVA. United.com wouldn't offer the connection. I called to have an agent build the itinerary manually and the computer came back with 110,000 miles (which is 30k for OKA->TPE and 80k for TPE->SFO). I just told her that the award chart says that the award should be 80k for that routing. She went to her help desk without further prompting, and came back with the standard 80k miles for a partner Japan->US award.