Error when changing award ticket
 

I have an business class award ticket booked for SFO-WAW (via YYZ on Polish) and returning Oslo-SFO (via Lisbon on TAP). I am checking for better dates or routing, and when I do see something available, I get an error all the way at the end on the checkout page when I click on "change flight". I called UA and they were able to manually change it, however, it took almost an hour of being on hold and then explaining to the agent what I needed.

Is there some trick to making this work better? Do I need to change one segment at a time? I am tempted to just cancel the whole thing and start over, but am afraid that the availability I'm seeing is "phantom". Any ideas? Your help is appreciated!

I have had very little luck changing award flights - even simple ones -- online with UA. I tried to do it this weekend because I wanted to move yup our flights to Japan to get here before the typhoon... Typically I would just book the new flights that I want and then cancel the old -- but the economy saver price went from 40k to 53k so I had no choice but to call since they issued a waiver -- and it took over an hour...

If you don't have enough miles to book another flight before cancelling you did the only thing that seems to work reliably -- calling in and giving up an hour + of your life...

Generally it is a bad idea to change a partner award ticket online. You risk some ugly outcomes. And possibility ending up with no ticket.
If there was new award availability for the entire new itin, it is better to book new and then cancel the old. This avoids the phantom issue.

Also it is better to book awards as OneWays, making it easier to change (if not using the excursion perk).

Ok. thanks. I guess there are no tricks except to give up an hour of my life :(. Having to call is such a crap shoot. The first person I spoke with was so clueless (Latvia is not in the same continent as Poland!?) that I hung up. 2nd person was super efficient and got it done in 5 minutes and totally worth the additional ~20 minutes I spent on hold.

Unfortunately these are business class tickets, and we don't have enough miles to book a new itinerary and cancel the old. We are taking advantage of the excursion perk, so have a complicated 3-leg/multi-stop itinerary. What we have now is not ideal but ok. Maybe I'll just wait until the date gets closer. I see a lot of saver availability within 2 weeks of travel

I recommend messaging the Twitter/X team to change award flights. Give them your confirmation number, name, email, and the exact details of what you want to change, and you don't have to stay on hold while you wait for an agent to click through. In my experience, they're also way more adept at handling changing individual legs of an award booking, especially when I'm using the Excursionist perk.

Oh wow! I would never have thought to do this. Can you please provide their twitter/x account name? How do you message them? Sorry, I'm not an expert twitter/x user.

It's just United Airlines. You can also text 32050 to speak with an agent via text message.

Is the service/team the same for twitter/x and for SMS?

This is their official X/Twitter account. Open their profile while logged in, and you can see a mailbox icon near the top right, under their banner. Click it to initiate a DM with them.