Two months ago I wrote about United’s unpublished business class partner award discount.
United had been charging less for partner awards than their award chart says they should, charging as though you were flying on United.
Since the Great Devaluation United has charged substantially more miles to fly business and first class on partner airlines rather than on United itself.
Then last week the pricing glitch inexplicably came back.
The first time it wasn’t an ‘announced sale’ — United fixed the glitch. But the glitch came back.
United’s ‘bad penny’ IT started discounting partner awards again, and the fix must be challenging because a few days after they started underpricing award tickets they announced it as an official sale to run through February 28.
This shows as ‘Posted Tue., Feb. 3, 2015’ but recognizes that the ‘sale’ began January 30. It’s published to last through February 28 for travel through December 31.
(HT: Megan R.)
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Nice. Too bad no saver in Econ/Biz to CNS from ORD in all of Dec. Much prefer to use AA, but even AA has zero flights for the weekend of the 19th.
Hopefully something opens up, I just booked the return on ‘delta’/VA this morning and still need to get there!!
Gary – thanks for posting. I have an intra-Europe award for this summer at 30K/ticket. I tried to change online to see if it would reprice at 25K/ticket and it did but the website wouldn’t let me complete the booking process. If I call, do you think they’ll credit me back 5,000 miles?
AMM to the USA is still pricing at 80k unfortunately
Can you reprice awards already booked if the inventory has disappeared?
Lots of LH space still shows up as 70K in business on various dates for US-Europe. It seems pretty random.
Doesnt seem to be workign every time i click the book now link i get
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yeah, it seems it is pricing at the price for UA as the MSC
In the meantime, AA charging more for its award tickets to Asia in business, form 110K to 120K miles!
@Kalboz do share more.
* The AAdvantage partner award chart still shows 55k each way
* US Airways was always 120k roundtrip for South Asia
I booked a one-way trip from Hong Kong to Japan in early March at 22,500 miles. When I do a search now, it shows up as 20,000 miles. The United mobile app brings it up at 25,000 miles – really broken.
Gary care to speculate why they are running these sales? Throwing disgruntled elites a bone now that fuel prices have come down?
@mike my speculation is that an IT error cropped up that they couldn’t fix quickly so they decided to put a positive spin on it