It's a bummer and I sympathize.

Over the past year I redeemed on transpac TG (twice), transpac OZ and transatlantic LH. They do exist but require persistence and probably quite a bit of luck.

But still in C 90K to south or north asia, or 80K to europe is better than any other airline...

Plus filtering or not, good luck finding international awards with DL, CO or even AA mileage (consider BA restriction or nonexisting Qantas awards to Australia).

Then why don't those multiple FTers respond with the name of that United exec and an account of what was said.... I'm curious to know.

You weren't at the Freddie's the other year when BJ had a discussion about the filtering with the UA executive. BJ could probably give you first hand account what was said if he still would be around here on FT.

Me too. I've asked in other threads but have not received a name.

So you don't believe that UA actively and knowingly filters *A award availability? Let's have an exercise. See what flights the starnet shows available in LH C (I class) HEL-FRA on June 23rd. None perhaps?

Do a manual sell on any of the following LH flights to see whether is come back as HK or UC.

LH3109
LH3107
LH3101
LH3103
LH3105

As a matter of fact every single LH flight HEL-FRA on 23rd of June has both I and X available and will come back us confirmed.

Are these some of the take home points ?

do your award booking early in month at least for LH and

if you prefer to use a * carrier other than UA, avoid itns already served by UA

My situation is pretty similar to yours. I was able to use 400,000 miles this year for 1 UA F saver India-US, 2 SQ C India-Australia, and 1 SQ F India-Australia. I am left with 200,000 miles which I am desperately trying t use for a saver C/F Asia-US. After trying for nearly 2 months, I have booked a Std Award in February. I will keep checking to see if a saver opens up, but if not, I will use the Std Award.

After that, I am done with UA and their scam.

For the last one month or so, I had tried booking an award in C from NYC-DPS. As I have read many horror stories from other posts about getting to DPS (the MPM issues, the TPAC and TATL issues and no stop policies, coupled with Starnet blockings), my search came to an end on 7/3/08 with an agent getting me a SQ25 and SQ22 as the outgoing and incoming flights, all in C ^^^.

What I thought of as an end of the misery of getting the best seat in 'C' turned out to be the start of mega headache :mad:

I needed to change the inbound date as I had accepted the earlier date just to protect the outbound. Now I found same SQ22 available on the desired date, but the next agent told me this is an 'illegal' routing. And now any agent who looks at this booking tells me "this is an illegal routing, but you can go ahead and travel, if you tried to change anything on this itenarary, the whole booking would be cancelled". :mad::mad:

I am still trying to find any carrier that will take me over-water (TATL) on my desired dates. There are tones of 'C' in ANA tool, non is existant to my beloved UA/MP CSRs. Travel date in in next two weeks, I will try for another week and if nothing turns-up, will have to cancel look for it another time.:td:

if you can book an award to SIN book it and then buy a cheap sin-dps. The transpac SQ award in C is gonna put you in coach on that segment anyway.

And you are complaining?:confused: : Let's see, this year you got 4 premium awards but another one is not working out - and you are calling it a scam??? :rolleyes:

Are these some of the take home points ?

do your award booking early in month at least for LH and

if you prefer to use a * carrier other than UA, avoid itns already served by UA

Yes.

There was plenty of availability on TG/SQ in C, but as usual the agents could not even "see those flights". So, I had to pay an extra 60,000 miles to fly UA F, and due to bad connection times, spend about $250 to spend an extra day/night in Singapore. Even the UA F saver opened up only about 10 days before departure. It was a fluke that I even saw it. I still ended up spending an extra 60,000 miles and $250 more than I should have.

On SQ from India to Australia, I actually had a 3rd ticket in C, but UA lost the booking. They actually lost 2 of them, but since I was a GS at the time, I got them to manually reinstate one of them. They weren't able to reinstate the 2nd one, and instead gave me an SWU as a goodwill gesture. The GS agent confirmed that it was UA's mistake.

I do consider it a scam, because UA intentionally prevents their members from redeeming a large percentage (>50% ?) *A partner awards to/from the U.S.

I am self employed. I don't have someone else picking up my tab for my travels. I am not a consultant etc either that I get reimbursed by my customers. The only reason I have put with UA's shoddy product and service was for the mileage redemption. And now I find my miles are worth about 50-60% what they should be.

UA's MP program's T&C certainly allow for them to make any changes they want, including ending the program. Then why not be up front with customers and disclose Starnet filtering ? Then I wouldn't consider it to be a scam.

The above needs repeating - any UA agents out there please try this and you'll see that holtju2 is absolutely correct!

Good for you.

Thanks. I do consider myself to be in a better position than some others in this forum.

At this point, I am just looking to cash out, even if at a discount.