StrongEagle

Perhaps this is all old hat for you experienced travelers, and, I offer up my experiences in traveling to Asia on United. My bride and I traveled from Houston (IAH) to Singapore (SIN), then to Bali (DPS), and finally back to Houston. We started our journey on June 25th and arrived back home on July 11, with a couple of wrinkles on the way.

First, I comment on the Star Alliance website, telling me how great it is that I can travel on all sorts of partner airlines. If only that were actually the case. I started searching very early on for award travel on the United website, more than 4 months in advance. Virtually all of the flights offered were on United only, with the occasional EVA flight, and an Emirates or two if I wanted to fly the opposite direction.

Following the advice here and elsewhere, I signed up for frequent flyer programs on ANA, Air Canada, and Singapore Airlines. There were a ton of great flights available as award travel with ANA, fewer options with the other airlines. The only problem was that even with calling United and trying to book, none of these flights showed up for the United staff and I was stuck using United to get out of the USA.

IAH to SIN wasn't too bad. First a flight IAH to LAX, a 2 hour layover (I could have chosen flights to make it 1 hour), then a direct flight LAX to SIN at a little over 17 hours on a 787. This turned out to be a pretty decent flight in premium economy... I would observe that I had no other choices to get to SIN... nothing from IAH to NRT or TPE, common Asia destinations out of IAH.

After a week in Singapore, we caught a Singapore Airlines flight to Bali... an SQ A330, uneventful, and the only SQ flight offered as an award miles flight by United anywhere on my itinerary. We spent a great week in Bali, then headed to the airport to catch our flights home, which were on EVA to Taipei, then EVA to Seattle, then United back to Houston. Getting home was much more difficult... this leg included a 5 hour layover in Seattle. We had originally chosen EVA for better service back to the USA, decided that we did not want to wait five hours in Seattle (7 PM to midnight, essentially) but even more than 2 months out, we had no more Saver options available to us).

We had been worried about the Bali volcano causing our flights to be cancelled but when we arrived, it was our EVA flight to Taipei that was cancelled due to a typhoon. The EVA folks in DPS were pretty useless. They sent us over to Emirates to book a flight home. Emirates informed us that we would have to contact the original booking agent (United) in order to find alternate flights.

I call United long distance from Bali. The first guy I talked to was very knowledgeable and explained all our options as follows.

a) We could only be re-booked on flights that had award seats available. Thus, we could not fly SQ back to Singapore, then catch the UA flight back to LAX because it had no award seats.
b) United code share flights don't count as United flights for re-booking award travel... there was an ANA flight to NRT, code shared with UA, and connecting to a UA flight to IAH but that was no go for us.
c) This person reserved space for us on a couple of Thai flights... last two seats to Bangkok, and recommended we get into line at the Thai counter ASAP.
d) After checking all other options with EVA, we called United again, and got a different agent who barely understood what was going on, but after 20 minutes did finally get us confirmed reservations on Thai airlines.

Thus, we ended up getting booked on a Thai flight to Bangkok (BKK), then on to TPE (Thai again), and finally a UA flight to IAH. We had a 10 hour layover at Tokyo, which we used to go into town and take a tour of the city. We got home about 11 hours later than we had originally scheduled.

Our takeaways from this trip:

a) Perhaps it's the fact that we live in a UA hub, and, there is virtually no other award miles flight choices from Houston to Asia, except United, even multiple months out. I'd really like to have the option to catch ANA out of IAH to Asia.
b) If you end up with a cancelled award miles flight, it can be problematic as you can only get booked on another award miles flight unless you want to pay the freight for a ticket. Fortunately, Thai airlines qualified. Emirates did too... but with a huge layover in Dubai
c) Overall, UA did a decent job of getting us onto another flight to get home, and I found their in air service to be better than it was 5 years ago, the last time I flew UA to Asia.

Thanks for reading.

mahasamatman

Sorry, but these are contradictory statements. Very early is 10-11 months. Four months is close to "last minute" for award travel.

Virtually all airlines offer more seats to their own frequent fliers than to the other *A programs. That could be what you were running into.

How did you manage that? You can't book Premium Economy on any airline with United miles.

PsiFighter37

I think it depends on how far out you are looking. I did a similar trip this year (NYC to DPS RT) in late May, and 9 months out, I was able to book a trip there and back in saver business class both ways. Even 4-5 months out, there was still a way to piece together an itinerary that would allow for saver J travel both ways.

TBH I am not sure how Emirates ended up as an option to contemplate if you were booking using UA miles, as they are not a partner (nor are they part of Star Alliance).

jsloan

4 months in advance isn't "early on" -- it's more or less the worst possible time to look. 11 months in advance is "early on" -- some programs open up award inventory at the beginning of the schedule, so that's when to look for them. Other airlines will wait until they don't believe they'll sell their seats, so they'll open up inventory closer in before departure -- often as late as one week beforehand. (United, in particular, will often open award space one or two days before departure).

Also, Emirates isn't a UA partner. Perhaps you mean Turkish?

Airlines -- including United -- often reserve more award seats for their own frequent flyers than they do for partners.

UA doesn't offer Premium Economy on that route -- in fact, they only have one plane with PE in the entire fleet, and it's a 777, not a 787. You were in Economy Plus, which is Economy with extra legroom. Regardless, I'm glad that you found it to be a decent flight. I'm surprised that you weren't able to find any other options, though.

SQ is particularly stingy with partner inventory, other than short-haul flights.

Did you keep looking? I've found EVA availability TPAC to be pretty good.

FYI: Skype (and Google Voice, I think) both allow you to call US 800#s on WiFi for free.

EVA was responsible for getting you home after they cancelled your flight. Award inventory should not come into play, although it's commonly cited as a limitation by agents who don't want to do the work to re-accommodate passengers in a paid class of service. Once you called UA, however, you were, in fact, limited to award seats, at least when dealing with partner airlines. If SQ had award availability to SIN, UA should have been able to open award space to LAX/SFO, if there were any seats available at all. (Technically, UA wouldn't have had an obligation to open award space on their own flights either, but they're generally good about this).

While you can't book an award seat on a codeshare, you would have been able to book an award seat on the NH-operated flight under its native (NH) code, if there were award space available. However, UA can't open award space on a codeshare flight.

This hasn't been my experience at all. However, if you're seeing this in the future, try searching from other gateways; for example, see what you can find from LAX or SFO. Then, if UA has award space to LAX or SFO, you may be able to get an agent to add it on; alternatively, you may have to buy that segment, but it may still be a huge savings over a flight to Asia.

EVA shirked their responsibility here.

^ Glad to hear it.

mduell

These are terrible timeframes for booking award tickets. The best availability IME is 9-12 months out and 0-2 weeks out.


Emirates was wrong, EVA was the one obliged to rebook you since it was their cancellation the day of. Operating carrier causing the disruption is always the one responsible for rebooking you to your next stopover.

Jaimito Cartero

StrongEagle

Ahh... yes, booked economy, then paid $99 per seat to upgrade the LAX-SIN leg.

Kacee

That's not Premium Economy. It's Economy Plus. Just a seat with a few inches extra legroom.

StrongEagle

Yes, now that you mention that, it is strange that EVA sent us to the Emirates ticketing office, stranger still that they found us Emirates flights when we returned to the EVA booking office, all before insisting that we needed to contact our original booking agent. I am now puzzled about what should have happened, in light of other comments made that it was EVA's responsibility to get us out of DPS.

Right you are. Apologies. My first intro to Premium Economy was way back when EVA was flying 747's to TPE... 6? across in the nose... would like to have that back.

jsloan

It was entirely reasonable for EVA to put you onto Emirates flights home. However, that should have been done at no charge to you -- EVA should have handled the ticketing. The only reason that they should have sent you to Emirates was to check in, after EVA had pushed the ticket over to Emirates.

It is possible that EVA pushed the ticket over improperly -- it's fairly easy to miss a step -- and that's what caused the Emirates agents to react the way that they did.

emcampbe

eyuro

I was booked HKG-EWR on UA180 in C this past Friday for my return trip home. Thursday afternoon at about 4pm HK time, I received a text message that my flight would be delayed until about 2pm due to aircraft maintenance. Not being able to switch to any of the other UA flights due to my need to arrive in EWR with enough time to get home before Friday night sundown, I switched to an award ticket. My search for what was still available for Thursday evening, had me leaving at 11:15pm with LH in F for 140,000 miles. The layover in FRA was about 7 hours with a connection to LH 402 on the 747-8. I must tell you, there is no comparison to the FA's in F on LH to the FA's in C on UA. It took about 5 minutes for me to realize that I was going to enjoy every minute of the extra 10 hours it took to get home. Leaving at that late departure time meant that I already had my dinner and was ready to fall into a deep Ambien induced sleep. When I awoke, I realized that they had tucked me in with their nice thick duvet.
When I arrived in FRA I chose to walk to the LH First Class terminal. Wow!! The food for both breakfast and lunch was exquisite looking, but alas not kosher. However the over the top selection of 21 to 30 year old scotch more than made up for the lack of food. They tried to tell me that I can eat the food because no one was looking, but I explained to them that there was someone looking and that in a few hours I would be 7 miles closer to him than I was now. It turns out that the lox was certified kosher so I did have a few slices.
After my ride in the Mercedes to the plane, the short flight home to EWR was just icing on the cake. Having my luggage waiting after immigration was also a nice touch. There are plenty of additional options if you have the time to search for flights on a daily basis. I find that the LH options usually become available in the last few days before your departure.

jsloan

Glad it worked out, but I'm curious -- did you try explaining this to UA? If none of the UA options worked for you, it's not out of line to ask them to put you onto LH on their dime. (Of course, it would have been J, not F, but still...)

EmailKid

Best price for E+ "upgrade" I've seen posted EVER per mile flown / time spent BIS.

Then again, with planes going out more than half empty in coach .....

I've received FAR better service on LH intraEurope flights in coach than ANY of the dozens of "Polaris" UA flights

Well, the 747s are gone, but ya, that was one great trip (LAX-TPE for me). But Premium Economy is still there, just can't be booked with miles, for now anyway. As someone posted, UA has its first bird with true PE, so they *may* sell PE using miles in the future.

StrongEagle

We were also very fortunate on our re-booked return trip. The plane was completely full... we were assigned seats in E+ , (NRT-IAH) when we got our new DPS-BKK-NRT-IAH routing at no additional charge. And Thai economy was already spacious, relatively speaking at about 35" of pitch.