A successful split:

I was able to use Expedia.com's multiple cities reservation to ticket me ORD-MEX-SJO-MEX-ORD even though ORD-MEX and MEX-SJO have the same flight number (as do SJO-MEX and MEX-ORD for the return flight). The fare was a bit higher ($30 or so, incl. $5 to Expedia) than booking directly through ual.com as ORD-SJO-ORD. I am keeping my fingers crossed, as I haven't flown yet, but I did get Expedia to confirm that I would receive miles for both segments (not that UA will care what Expedia says).

I had been frustrated quite a bit and unable to do this on travelocity and orbitz (except at much higher prices), ual.com, 2P reservations, or mileage plus. It's about 1300 miles difference over the whole trip, and in this case it actually means the difference between 1P and 2P for 2004 so I am glad I persisted.

I do wonder what will happen when I try for an upgrade. Will they let me upgrade the whole itinerary for two awards, or will I have to upgrade each flight individually? Well, time to find out.

Anyway, you may want to check the non-UA travel sites to see if they will issue tickets this way. As I say though, I am going to be pretty vigilent until I actually get the miles in my account.

Art

I've got a ticket from SEA to LHR on a "direct flight" that stops and changes planes in ORD. I have different seat assignments on the SEA-ORD and ORD-LHR segments, which should produce two boarding passes.

Within UA's system, will this break the direct flight into segments and thus provide full mileage credit?

Artuero...FYI, United's own website has this Multi-Segment booking option as well, as mentioned in a few posts above.

Re your upgrades: You don't mention if your upgrades are confirmed or waitlisted and you also don't mention which type of upgrade media you are attempting to use. Knowing your elite status would be helpful as well. This will impact a correct answer to your question. But just to give one example if all of your flight were upgrade confirmable in advance:

If your upgrade media is a Confirmed One-Way type (like a Confirmed Region 1 or Systemwide), you should have no problem using one for the entire direction.

Additionally if you are waitlisted for the upgrade, having split segments actually improves your upgrade chances, as they will now clear individually one-by-one instead of only if both/all are available for upgrade.

Jeeves, in my experience you will only get mileage credit for the one flight number's point to point distance, and not as a split itinerary.

You will indeed get two boarding passes, but on the second one you will see the wording "Re-Boarding Pass" printed on it.

Unfortunately that's the mark of doom for this type of attempt, and does not make it a true multi-segment for purposes of more miles, in my experience.

Just as an additional warning...

Recently when I have had two ticket coupons for one flight number, the boading pass still says, "Re-boarding pass."

Luckily, the last time I had this, I was on a full fare, and I was able to redo things without add/ collect.

zrs70...yes. I've had them happen and I've mentioned that in this and other threads on this subject.

I think this has something to do with the airport folks who, for some reason, often re-combine your segments after you went to all the trouble to split them!

[This message has been edited by PremEx (edited Nov 21, 2003).]

PremEx, what was strange about this was that I was unable to use the multicity option on ual.com to ticket me the right way. Either I would get messages that the flights were not available, or I would get to the first stage of booking and then would get an error on the second phase. I tried to get web support to handle it but they were unable to do so. Expedia worked for some reason. And Mileage Plus upgraded me (using miles) without messing up the itinerary so I think I am looking good.

So for people looking to split the same flight number into multiple segments, I have to suggest that if one site doesn't work, another might.

This is not unusual. Expedia.com is far better at booking multi-segment trips than any airline website.

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"It's as easy as 1, 2, C" -- Kelly, Married With Children

I thought I would do a follow up to my original post.

To recap - I bought a ticket SFO-JFK-LHR UA956 and didn't understand that even though I was landing and changing planes that I would only be credited with the miles of a direct flight.

I tried to sever the flights before I flew, and 3 calls to UA Reservations yeilded nothing.

I then attempted to stand by for an earlier flight. Unfortunately the day I flew out of SFO, the PremEx line was stood still - caused by some guy who needed 45 minutes to do something special at the check in desk, leaving only 1 agent to help all the *Gold passengers. The 1K line was almost as long, and perhaps as a result of all the EQM bonuses, the 2P line ended up being the fastest. I missed the standby window by 5 minutes, but the GA though that had I been able to stand by that I would have been credited correctly.

I did manage to upgrade, but unfortunately I could not find anyone (either in SFO or JFK) who was willing to issue me a new 2nd boarding card that didn't say "Reboarding" on it.

After I got home, I tried calling M+ several times, but they would absolutely not budge - even after I explained that I needed the miles for 1K and would have to book needlessly complicated flights the rest of the year. So I'm now needlessly booked on 2 connecting flights (rather than a direct) and on 2 more nearly sold out airplanes (vs. 2 nearly empty planes) which will waste 6 hours of my time and generate no additional revenue to UA just because the M+ people are so inflexible (to maintain the integrity of the M+ program).

But ---- the funny thing is that just today, I logged into M+ and found 10,000 miles extra in my account, posted as bonus miles for the USA-LHR promo. Had they severed the flights, I would have only recieved the JFK-LHR segments as bonus miles, but since they were so pigheaded, I ended up with about 3000 more miles in the end anyway.

Go figure.

Lesson learned: if you want the EQM, make sure your flights are booked as 2 segments from the start.

Ah, and I learned as well. Even though I booked via the phone (upgrading with miles, so website is useless).

Agent reads out flights and I think I've got a connection at JFK. It's only when I check out itinerary at united.com that I see I have only three segements - bugger!

Fortunately, I'll squeak by for PremEx-Lite thanks to DEQM, but it could have been a disaster.

Moral of the story: Get flight numbers before committing to a booking! If they are the same, then book another routing.

This is exactly how I thought things worked. BUT, does anyone have some insight on this? I recently flew SFO-BKK on UA837. My itinerary card shows this as:

So, this was definitely one flight number. I thought that I was going to have the same issue as described above: only SFO-BKK direct miles posting, rather than SFO-NRT-BKK.

Just prior to booking, I looked up the distances on the Great Circle Mapper; the difference was less than 100 miles, so I decided to forget about working around this. But when the miles posted, I ended up seeing:

So, for the pros: why did my flight credit show up as two separate segments? From the above discussions, it doesn't sound like the plane change triggered this. What about the date change (20-21 Nov)? What about the different seats?

fiat_owner

Different seats= No.

Mine were different seats and different class of service.

Can't say about the other two...

It's definitely not the date change. Otherwise everyone would be getting split mileage credits, seeing as how the date changes every single time.

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"It's as easy as 1, 2, C" -- Kelly, Married With Children

Just luck, I would guess. Maybe one of our UA employee friends can shed some light.

I flew the same flight(s) myself on November 26 (UA 837 SFO-NRT-BKK). Had different seat assignments on the two segments. The departure dates for each segment were different, of course! But I received only 7,924 miles. (I knew about this in advance and it doesn't hurt my plans to make 1K using the Double EQM offer, so I didn't bother to try to do a "split" to get the 87 extra flight miles in each direction.)


Kathy

fiat_owner

I had different seat numbers (13A to JFK and 6A from JFK).

The killer, as others have stated, is the 'reboarding pass' on the continuation BP.

Have others had any luck getting this removed at the airport.

However, I guess I'm going to be more vigilant in booking flights and making sure it's not the same flight number. In hind sight, I should have booked the later JFK-SFO flight and then asked to go on the earlier one. It would have been two coupons at that point. The JFK-SFO was wide open, but I guess you take your chances of a long layover.