Yesterday we talked about how American Airlines award availability recently has been really (REALLY!) bad! The example I used was of a simple flight from Cincinnati (or ANY airport within 100 miles) to Portland over a particular weekend – I found ONE flight outbound and ZERO inbound. Today I thought I’d take a look at United award ticket availability to see if it was any better
Checking United award ticket availability
When trying to book this award ticket for my friend, in addition to checking the American award ticket availability, I checked on United (and everywhere else!). One of the advantages of using airline miles is that it’s a lot easier to mix airlines. When paying cash, if you flew American Airlines one way and United airlines on the return trip, your ticket would almost certainly be priced as two different one-way tickets, and generally much more expensive. But with award miles, there’s no problem at all!
Okay so let’s look at the United award ticket availability for Portland to Cincinnati
Uhhhhhh…..
That’s even worse!
For the entire month of April, there are THREE(!) dates with an open economy seat. ANY seat at all! And in May there’s only ONE! One of the commenters in the American Airlines post suggested that American’s poor award availability was due to it being spring break for some schools, but I don’t think
A few notes on the poor United award ticket availability
A few notes – I was logged in to my United.com account, though I do no longer have the Chase United card, so I was not able to see if availability was any better in the “secret” fare bucket that United elites and credit card holders have access to.
Secondly, that screenshot is from a few weeks ago, and when I searched again this morning, United award ticket availability was a LITTLE better – but still really bad. There were a few more dates available, but all of the United award tickets at the saver level were on a red-eye flight or had 2 stops (or both!)
That’s 9 hours of flying (including a red eye) and 4 1/2 hours of layover to get from Portland to Cincinnati. That’s quite a premium to pay for a Saver flight. If that were my only option, maybe it would be time to suck it up and book a Standard award! In this case, as I mentioned yesterday, I was able to find a cash ticket back for $117, which I booked with ~8000 ThankYou points
Contrasting this United award ticket availability with the much-maligned Delta program, where I was able to get EIGHT seats on a cross country flight with no problem. There were multiple days available and even multiple FLIGHTS on the same day (READ: The worst usage of 100,000 Skymiles EVER?)
What has your experience been trying to find United award ticket availability?
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I haven’t had a major issue, but I’m usually not looking for domestic awards. I use my United miles for intl Star Alliance awards, and scored biz class seats to take my gf and I for an epic Southern Africa trip back in Sept. Availability wasn’t wide open, but I was lucky enough to be flexible enough to craft our itinerary around what was available. Going there we flew Ethiopian in biz which was amazing, and coming back to Boston, we flew SAA and Lufthansa also in biz. Maybe we just got lucky, but I’ve also searched just for curiosity for other destinations with no intention to book, and while not wide open, there were bookable options, which I did not see with AA. Then again I held onto my Chase United card, not sure if that is the difference. At this point, Star Alliance seems to fit my needs, especially for intl travel, so I’m sticking with them until I see a reason to change.
I have my issues with United the airline, but you’re smoking something if you thinking the availability is as bad as American. The domestic availability is indeed not better than AA, but internationally it’s an order of magnitude better. United makes more seats available (both coach and premium cabins) on its own flights, especially close-in. American will let an empty flight go out without a single saver flight seat opening up, but United is consistently making those seats available close-in. Same tends to apply for many of their partners, esp. those of the Lufthansa Group. And you’re not stuck paying so-called fuel surcharges.
Yeah – I definitely agree regarding international partners. Lately, American doesn’t seem to be making ANYTHING available internationally
Especially when looking for partner and international award availability, ignore the calendar. Often on dates that don’t show as available on the calendar, there will be partner flights available. Also meant to mention that UA’s website shows the vast majority of their partners, whereas AA most definitely does not.
Thank you for pointing out the excellent Delta availability. I just checked, and for the month of April, 15 out of the 30 days has low-level availability at 12,500 miles one-way. That’s 50%! And for the other days, award tickets are either 17,500 or 20,000….less than the “no saver availability days” on UA or AA.
I booked 3 economy seats from Houston to Maui for this coming summer, 11 months in advance, and could only get a 2 stop flight. Tried to fly Hawaiian Airlines but the CSR at UA did everything possible for me to stick with UA. And I have the UA card. Hopefully the availability will be better for international destinations. I’ve had better luck with European destinations in the past.
The nice thing about that is that with a 2 stop flight, you’re likely to get a schedule change on one of those flights some time in the next 11 months. Then, you can call in and if you get a nice CSR, they can open up space on more convenient flights, even if there isn’t any award availability shown
I have to also disagree. I do have a UA credit card and am Lifetime Premier Gold, so I almost always find awards for domestic and international destinations. I don’t often see saver awards unless I’m booking far out for international travel, often but not always with partners, as well, but I’d still say I find 1 stop saver awards about half the time even on domestic destinations.
That is a far cry from AA, which has horrible availability for either. My only successes with AA were booking far out for LAX-MIA domestically…and AA has changed those flights so many times with equipment changes and schedule changes that I’ve had to rebook each one about 3-4 times! My only success with AA over UA internationally was with a LHR-LAX FF award, which did price slightly less at standard level than the same flight on UA GF for Oct 2016.
With DL, awards domestically invariably cost more miles than for UA…or have much worse routings, more stops, and/or terribly long or short connections. My only success with DL was for my husband’s award SNA-SLC. Not impressive. Not even considering the simple fact that I can’t even book any F international awards since DL doesn’t have those or allow those on partners.
Everyone loves to slam UA…but we’ve been remarkably happy with UA insofar as getting the awards we want whenever we tend to want them. It is harder to get saver awards nowadays, but that is even more true for AA and DL based on the ridiculous number of flights that we consider.