Hi Everyone,

I'm new to this forum, but I have been lurking for a couple of weeks trying to learn the "lay of the land." I have earned my status from just business travel. I would like to try a mileage run, but I am having some difficulties. I have changed my preference to "expert" mode. I then log in, go to the flights screen, enter the information, and put MPW124 in the code area. At this point, I get this error message:

Please verify the entries again or refer to the promotional rules for more information. To access the rules, go to the Create Itinerary page and click on the "More Info" link.
The certificate number or promotion code entered is invalid.

If I go back and take out this code and go to the schedule screen, change the air_avail to 200, it still only shows me the same number of flights.

Any help you can give will be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
Josh

AFAIK, all Mileage Plus promotions codes do not have to be entered into fare search areas. Those "promotion/e-certificate codes" boxes are for discounts or other electronic vouchers.

What's MPW124, btw?

Incorrect. Entering MP promo codes will show flights which qualify for that particular promotion.

IIRC, MPW124 was the double miles promo. I think the booking period has ended though.

Tip #4 Setting United.com to display fares that qualify:
1. Go to united.com login to your MP account and click on flights (get to "Create itinerary: Shop for flights")
2. enter your from, to and designed dates, 20 flights (more on that later), "search by schedule", 2+ connections, and the MPW124 code. Do NOT enter anything in the upgrade eligibility field.
3. It will show you some flights, but probably not the ones you really want.
Go to the top of the browser in the address bar where it shows the URL it just used. change the air_avail=20 to air_avail=200. This will increase the number of flights it checks and makes the website actually work. Hit enter after adding that one "0" to the URL.
4. When the complete search comes back, select your flights from the ones that have the "Every day low fares" AND the "promotion eligible" tags. I am pretty sure that "every day low faires" means that "w" is available on international flights, maybe domestic too.
5. Price the selection. It will come back with a "promotion eligible price" and then below, lower price options that do not qualify.



This was from the United Airlines FAQ Sticky. I misread it and thought that was the code to see available routings, but I see now that is incorrect.

So, not my question is how I get the site to show all available routings. Even when I change the air_avail to 200, it still only shows me the standard number.

Usually, United.com is only good for showing single-connection routings, or at best, dual connections. It's feeble little mind will sometimes offer more complex routings, but they're never a valid routing for a single fare but rather an end-on-end construction of multiple fares that tends to be very pricey.

You need to look up the fare rules' routing info, which you can find by doing a dummy booking on Expedia.com and choosing the "Fare Rules" hyperlink beneath the flight info after choosing the flights that cost about what you're looking for. These will list the allowable connections in a routing (reading them is fairly simple, but I'd refer you to the MileageRun forum for detailed instructions). Sometimes the routing rules are so long they get truncated by Expedia, so you may need to pull them up in both directions by doing two dummy bookings, with the second one's origin & destination reversed.

Armed with this, you can then begin to use the United.com multi-city engine. Say you just found a potential route from IAD-CLE that runs something like IAD-LGA-CMH-ORD-CLE and back (just an example, but one I've used before in real life). You can either try to put in each and every city & time, OR you can omit connections you know it will automatically put in. By this, I mean you could do IAD-LGA-CMH-CLE as your cities, and it will automatically list "CMH-ORD-CLE" as the "flight" for CMH-CLE since there aren't any direct flights between the two.

Why do this? Well, United.com, no matter what you set the "air_avail=" paramter to, will often fail to even show some flights that it considers too "iffy" due to connection times being under an hour (even though 45 minutes is generably do-able and even less in some special circumstances, like when you know you'll be on the same plane for both legs). But when you let it put in the connection for you, it will bring up 45-minute connections without a problem.

You may have problems getting even a valid fare to price and/or book (such as getting, "We're sorry, the flight(s) you selected have just sold out" or some other idiotic, obviously incorrect error message. You can try rearranging the selections (maybe manually adding in a connecting city you left out as above, or removing one if you had it there before) to see if you can get it to book, or you can always call Reservations and get them to do it, pay the $5, and lose out on the 1,000 mile online booking bonus. Of course, if your MR involves things like overnight connections--valid if yours is the last flight in and the next flight out isn't until morning--you'll have to call anyway. United.com is just too dumb to grasp routings like that.