Earlier this week I wrote 2 posts about my troubles trying to find award availability for a domestic ticket from Portland to Cincinnati this April
(SEE ALSO: Why is American award availability so awful?)
(SEE ALSO: Ugh – United Award ticket availability seems just as bad!)
Following up on award availability
In the comments for the 2 posts, we’ve had quite a good discussion about several different topics, and I thought I would circle back and talk about a few of them. First off, some people suggested that one reason we weren’t seeing much availability was due to it being Spring Break.
Our Spring Break is actually at the end of march, near Easter (March 27th), but I guess other places have Spring Break at other times. As I talked on Twitter:
.@AwardTravelers Yup – if you are going where everyone wants to go when everyone wants to go… you’re probably out of luck 🙂
— Points with a Crew (@PointsWithACrew) January 1, 2016
The truth of the Traveler’s Triangle strikes again!
Finding additional award availability on United
The other major vein of comments regarded what I had mentioned about there being “extra” award space for United elites and credit card holders. There were some people who were not aware of this, so I thought I’d write a brief post about it.
Basically United has their standard saver economy award fares, which have fare code “X”, but they also open up ADDITIONAL economy saver availability for elite members or people who have one of the Chase United credit cards (fare code “XN”). I used to have the Chase United Explorer card, but I no longer have it as I canceled it rather than paying the annual fee.
Commenter Kenny was one of the ones to mention the “extra” fare code, and I emailed him to ask him to check the availability for the same dates that I had checked in my post, since he had the United card and therefore access to the extra United award availability
For reference, here’s my original screenshot of the United award availability
Pretty sparse, no?
And here’s the award availability for the SAME flight on the SAME dates, if you have access to the XN fare bucket (as either a United elite or a United co-branded credit card holder)
Quite a bit more, no? Kenny did mention that he was having trouble actually accessing some of those dates, but based on my past experience, that’s probably more of a website glitch. So, if you have an interest in flying United frequently, here’s one more reason to either keep elite status, or pay the annual fee on the credit card (or at least rotate it between spouses)
There IS actually one way to view the XN fare bucket even if you DON’T have the credit card, which I’ll cover in an upcoming post.
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
I think DL used to do the same thing before they abolished their award chart. Now everyone gets to use more Skypesos for their awards!
Please clarify. If you are seeking an award seat, there is no place to put in a “fare code” as you are seeking a “free” ticket. I have a Chase Sapphire and a Chase UAL card. thank you.
if you are logged in, and have either a united credit card or are a premier member, then additional seats might show up in the XN, IN or ON fare classes.
You don’t have to search for the fare class specifically, just do an award search. When an award ticket shows up, it might say “XN” instead of “X”.
In practice, there almost never is more space for premier or cardholders though, I’ve only seen it twice in the past 3 years.
Correct – as Augias says, you don’t have to do anything special. If you have the card, the extra award availability just shows up. I have seen dates have much more availability (as shown as my screen shot in the post)