There is a $75 fee to change carriers on a *A award once ticketed, even if the routing is the same. Three CSRs verified this.

This has always been my experience also. And as we all know, NO changes whatsoever on star awards (that involve carriers other than UA) after the first flight is flown.

Also - beware that doing this for example to change your outbound flights COULD cause your return flights to disappear if award space is not available at the time you make this change. You need to find a good agent who can handle this right.

FWIW, I share the frustration with UA's insane holding back on business & first class award tickets. At a time that we constantly hear that UA's biggest revenue problem is the lack of people buying premium fares, why is it that we have such poor availability in premium cabins? Baffling. These days, AA's premium award availability is leaps and bounds ahead of UA's. If however you're redeeming awards on UA partners, this seems to be pretty good (as shown in this thread and in my experiences), and UA's seems to get a LOT better as the flight date approaches.

Amen to this. I had to add another segment (and 3-1/2 more hours) because nothing was available on UA LAX/SFO-SYD in F while I got three (!) F seats on NZ LAX-AKL-SYD. And UA has 14 F seats on 744 while NZ only has 12. Go figure

Suggestion: secure your seats with Varig and swap them for UA as date approach, if UA is your line of choice. This way you have your travel secured in the cabin of your choice, yet free to change carriers.

Great idea. Is there a fee for ticket change?

Answered above: $75

So how soon before a departure day do people think that UA opens up those extra Biz and F seats for award travel? 1 day? 1 week? 1 month? There was plenty of F availability for the award flights I wanted but nothing in Biz. I'm going to take the F and if Biz does open, I'll downgrade to get 20k miles back. The .......s will likely let me do it for $50 per ticket.

$75 . Though if you have two tickets on the same PNR, I think you still only pay $75 for both. (Haven't done this in a LONG time, so it may have changed.)