In addition, note that whether you make a change (which is essentially a cancel the current flights and confirm the new flights you want), or even book this as new, that dependent on the fare rules and the pricing SAS/OZ is willing to sell on OAL metal, you may get very high pricing. Not sure about SAS, but many fares on OZ are unavailable on 016 stock, and may price you into full fare Y or close to it. Even if that is not that case, routing like that may cause higher prices due to circle routings and being across different continents. For example, I’ve tried pricing US-EU (stop) - India - US fares, and I’ve never been able to get it to price reasonably because of the stop in the EU (it will
price just normal with a FRA layover). So you may want to look at how the pricing works and what makes most sense - it may make sense to look at booking it all on one itin, breaking it into 3 one ways (which might not work because TATL one ways tend to be very expensive), to booking US-EU, ICN-US separately from the EU-ICN leg. The price could be high no matter which way you go. This trip may also be better to be booked through an agent who migh be able to have different airline combos price better, and to just cancel the existing itin and use the residual for a future trip.

Where are you seeing cheaper flight options? On United.com, or on a third-party website?

That’s not true. You’re thinking of ETCs that UA gives out as compensation (denied boarding, delays, etc). Those are limited to UA-operated flights. However, an ETC from a flight change is unrestricted.

This makes no sense, but it sounds like policy anyway, based upon what you are all saying. It’s ridiculous that UA will sell a ticket for travel on another airline, but if I have a credit balance after making a change, suddenly I can only use that for UA-operated flights.

As WineCountryUA points out, you can get around it by booking a zero-change-fee UA fare and then calling to change it, assuming you can get the agent to make the change for you (they will often refuse to issue tickets that don’t include at least one UA-marketed segment).

Sorry for the confusion.

You're experienced in here. And you expect airline policies to make sense?

Seriously, though, it does sort of make sense in that these are different things. An ETC is essentially a gift certificate, and is a form of payment, and the UA/UAX only restriction is a condition of it. The credit you get when you cancel a flight essentially leaves the value of everything in the ticket - not separate from it - which is why it can't be used by someone else because you can't change names on a ticket. UA basically takes the flights on your ticket out of the PNR at cancelation, replacing it with new flights (either at time of initial cancelation, or at some point later), charging the fee at the time the ticket is re-issued (ie, when you have your new flights).

LOL. Touché.

Right, but it doesn’t make sense to me to have the leftover funds be in a gift certificate that can only be used on UA if the initial purchase didn’t have anything to do with UA except for issuing the ticket.

What upgrade?

I don’t think there was any magic involved; I’m stunned that you were able to price that itinerary out for anything approaching a reasonable fare. Whatever pricing the computer came up with on your itinerary almost certainly must have been a mistake; I’m not really surprised that the rate desk didn’t find it initially.

Seems that way, although you can try purchasing an all-UA itinerary and then changing to the one you actually want.