nwflyboy

Just to be clear - in case anyone comes and reads the above, thinking that Our Long National Nightmare is over...

It's not fixed. At all.

Kacee

And you still can't book TG, TP, or SQ on UA, either.

Paella747

Hahaahaa! ^

goodeats21

I noticed a recent post from UA Digital Insider in the consolidated website issues thread, so thought I would ping him/her on the TG/TP/SQ issue... No response as of yet. Not holding my breath for a substantive answer...

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/30793308-post767.html

clarkm

This morning an agent was telling me that the underlying issue was with TG/SQ. She said that United had recently migrated from HP to Google (?) and that TG/SQ were having trouble connecting to it. She also said something about this being related to the recent app rollout (which doesn't make sense to me, since I thought that was a simple frontend/client change), so unclear how accurate this information is. I'd buy that this is related to some underlying system migration, even if the above details aren't right.

susiesan

I just put a deposit on a Holland America cruise that leaves from Sydney Jan. 6, 2020 and returns to Auckland Jan. 17, 2020. I was hoping to use UA miles to get to and from the cities. I can hold the cruise with just the $50 deposit until final payment 90 days before sailing. Surely UA will have this fixed by then.
Since I can see no availability on UA flights in business class to/from either Sydney or Auckland I was planning to fly on partner airlines SG or TG through Singapore or Bangkok.

nwflyboy

TG/SQ are connecting just fine to other systems.

Front line customer service agents...not the best source for accurate IT details IME. Everything said above looks like utter gibberish, complete nonsense divorced from any reality - in other words, exactly what I'd expect from such a source. "I think the intertubes are broken" is likely to be about as accurate.

nwflyboy

There's no telling when - or if - award seats on all these airlines will ever become available again. And while the little "notice" on the website specifically mentions THAI, SQ and TAP, "the issue" is not just limited TG, SQ, or TAP - award seats on most of United's partners have quietly but completely vanished over the past few months, and there's no reason to expect that any of them are ever coming back. ("The issue" is that as recently as 4 or 5 months ago, awards through United for many of its partners were somewhat available; now, award availability for almost every United partner is simply gone, every day, everywhere.) It just appears that United has gutted their program, slowly and in a piecemeal fashion, by removing nearly all partner award availability, without any fanfare or announcements.

For anyone planning an important trip, I think it would be foolish to count on being able to book award seats using United's MileagePlus program going forward. If you need to get somewhere, you will have to find another way. It has now been more than a month (almost 2 months?) since this latest MileagePlus devaluation; if they were going to "fix" it, they would have done so by now. I've reluctantly concluded that they actually have "fixed it" - this is what they wanted to do.

I have family in Bangkok, and we have been planning to visit there for next Christmas and New Years. This latest move from United (to pull all awards from THAI and others) caught us right as we were making our travel plans. I have plenty of miles for the trip, and it would have been a fairly easy one to book had it been planned for an earlier time. No more. MileagePlus seems to be destroyed (and not just for people trying to go to Thailand - it appears worldwide based on what I've seen). I had to come up with a Plan B (which wasn't easy or cheap). Pretty sure you will need to do that too.

If you really want to get there (Australia/NZ) you better start looking for another way - and soon. The booking window for flights in January has already opened, so by now any award availability has already come, and probably gone, (other partners continue to be able to book award flights, so the limited seats that become available are surely getting snapped up by members of other programs...as a MileagePlus member, with United miles to use, you are at a huge disadvantage - the seats that you want are getting taken right now by people with points in other programs).

Sadly, I don't think MileagePlus is viable anymore. Good luck.

susiesan

This is extremely disturbing. I just emptied out all my AAdvantage miles and was done with AA and lack of J awards. I have spent the last 3 years building up mine and my husband's MP accounts, getting Chase credit cards with UR points to be used for redeeming UA miles. We will be retiring later this year and I was planning to use my million plus UA miles to travel the world. I have had very good luck over the last few years getting J award tickets to Japan and South Korea, Myanmar, Tanzania, and South Africa for vacations. I was planning to travel to Europe in the future. Are these award seats scarce also? I can't fly coach anymore on these very long flights and I don't want to use the miles for standard J awards.

If I can't get to Australia or NZ for the cruise I will cancel it and go somewhere else.

Agosti

Seems NH spaces are also gone. I have been looking at FUK-NRT (JP domestic) in the past few days and today all of a sudden all dates of this route became unavailable on UA. There is availability on both NH and AV. Also tested IAH-NRT, same results.

zombietooth

NH was still available as of yesterday since I was able to book two NRT-IAH seats in F on the same flight. I also saw lots of J available.

Kacee

I've also booked several NH tickets within the past week.

dkc192

Yup, seems like the website is not showing NH space. Ran a number of searches, including US-TYO at the end of schedule (Jan 2020), US-TYO in Sep 2019, and TYO-SE Asia in Sep 2019, and no NH options in any class were shown. Didn't have time to cross check with EF or any other *A websites, and there could be several reasons for this beyond UA "IT issues", but this situation looks like one to monitor closely...

narvik

So, United is eliminating award availability on partner airlines at an average rate of one-per-week?

This is not good...

jsloan

This is hyperbole, pure and simple.

UA does not control partner inventory; the partner airlines do. If partner awards have quietly but completely been disappearing, the most likely reason is that the partners, themselves, are pulling the inventory from all other *A partners.

I wouldn't be surprised if the agent actually got a garbled version of the truth out when they mentioned switching to Google. Google runs a public cloud, and if they were switching some system from a system managed in a dedicated datacenter to Google Cloud, I could easily see errors like this happening as servers changed locations, firewall rules and routing tables had to be updated, etc.

Sure, UA doesn't appear to be prioritizing a fix, and I wish they would. But there's no need to imagine some huge conspiracy. Simple IT incompetence will do.