Upgrade availability vs. award availability
 

Are the two related i.e., if there is availability for standard award, is there availabilty for upgrade as well? Is it possible to have award availability but not upgrade availability? If they are related, do the Full fare and Select fare upgrades availability correlate with standard and saver awards availability?

I am particularly interested in international travel upgrades.

Apologies if this has been asked and answered earlier. None of my searches turned up answers to the above.

Thanks

Standard award travel on United is available based on the full fare booking class for that cabin, ie F C or Y.
Upgrade seats are based on availability in NF and NC and these are given less availability than the standard award.
Saver awards, depending on the cabin, are in general given less availability than the upgrade seats.
So it goes Standard award availability, then upgrade availabilty then Saver award availability. So it is always possible to have award availability but no upgrade availabilty.
Hope this helps

In other words, are you saying that Standard awards (with their higher mileage requirements) are always available as long as a seat in the requested cabin is available? So to check availability of Standard awards for a given class, one would only need to check flight/seat availability in that class?

Of course, I have NEVER used Standard awards! I always use Saver awards and would be very reluctant to spend the extra miles for Standard. Still, it's worth knowing.

Kathy

That was exactly my understanding regarding standard awards...if there is an open seat in the class you want, you can have it. Of course there's a significant cost to it. UAL.com doesn't even publish it's standard award table online to my knowledge. Last year, I had to travel to HKG for a last minute event and all saver awards were booked for 9+ days on both sides of my trip and thus had to pony up 150,000 miles.

Party was indeed fun, but it was tough to swallow.

Sorry for the confusion. Generally speaking, yes, if there is an empty seat in the cabin that you want then by using the standard award you will be able to be confirmed on the flight. There are only a few rare instances when this does not work, but, the way it works is if you can buy a ticket for the route then you can also get a standard award seat on those same planes since they are booked in the same class (the highest class available at that time).
Hope this clarifies.

I'm an AC Aeroplan member, considering switching programs so this is interesting information for me. AC awards are all capacity controlled and there is no option to pay additional miles if they're gone. What class do the *A awards come from? I can book a North America reward flight on UA for 25/40/60 Aeroplan miles, or to Western Europe for 60/80/100 - how do these points compare to the standard award levels on UA?