Award availability inconsistency (NH award using UA miles)
 

I've had a bit of an interesting experience trying to get an NH award from Shanghai to Tokyo recently. First I called the 1-800 number (no status, so it's just the plain ol' Mileage Plus desk). The agent I got apparently only could see PVG<->NRT availability. Even when I gave him the flight number for the SHA<->HND flight(NH1259/NH1260) he said it showed no availability. Then I try visiting the local ticket office (I'm currently in Shanghai; I called the 1-800 number with Skype first because this was a spur-of-the-moment thing that came to me late at night when the ticket office was closed) and voila, they could see it just fine and booked me onto it. Is this normal, or did I just get a "bad" agent when I called the 1-800 number?

To be clear, you were getting a UA award on NH, not an NH award.

It's entirely possible that you got a bad agent.

You might be seeing space on the ANA tool that ANA isn't publishing to Star Alliance partners, but only publishing as award space internally.

Nope, once I got the Shanghai UA office to change my PVG<->NRT to SHA<->HND the other agents at the 1-800 number could see availability on other dates for that flight too. So I'm just going to go with the "bad agent" explanation. Thanks for the help.

I've booked lots of free flights both on SHA-HND (and vice versa) and PVG-NRT (as well as NRT-PVG). I've always found the SHA-HND flights to be slightly harder to book, but not impossible. SHA-HND has always been more popular due to their close distance from Shanghai and Tokyo respectively. So free seats are sometimes harder to get.

Sometimes I've had blackout dates on SHA-HND flight which UA said was because of ANA saying it was blacked out, other times they said it was just unavailable in economy (although business class seats were open). But then I called back a day or two later and suddenly seats opened up. So it could be that availability was just not there at that time and became available sometime later.

It could be that the UA agent knows Shanghai usually means Pudong/PVG and just didn't key in SHA (or HND versus "Tokyo" Nartia).