Yes, it's legitimate. You can no longer build awards point-by-point. (Some agents may still try to force it through, but they're not supposed to, and the reports of success are getting less and less frequent).

 

Yeah. But if you keep checking and Business Class opens back up, you can then book it. Hopefully still enough time before your trip for something to open up.

They have really tightened down on piecing things together. If it isn't available as a fresh booking on the computer, pretty rare to get anything adjusted.

 

7 award ticket ??? I would not count on that become available and certainly not during peak summer travel season. Maybe last minute when TAP runs a 339 and has room to fill, but not in advance.

TAP can have some very attractive J fares to Europe. We booked some recently at $2.2k - destinations like AMS can run as low as $1.8k. While it will not be easy either to find J7 either - a lot better chance than finding I7

 

Good morning. I currently have a flight booked from AKL to LAX for 100,000 United miles. However, my final destination is MCI. When I go into United to change my trip, there is currently an option for 100,000 United miles that includes the original AKL to LAX flight, but adds on LAX to SFO and SFO to MCI. I'm able to make the selection, select my seats, but I get an error when checking out. I just got done chatting with them online and they tell me its impossible to make a change to an existing reservation that keeps the existing flight and adds on additional flights, he stated they would receive the same error if they tried to make the change for me. This doesn't seem to be correct, but wanted to see if anyone has ever had a similar experience.

 

Why don�t you just cancel and book a new itinerary?

 

Risk aversion I suppose. The flight is in a couple of weeks and the AKL to LAX is in business class. If I start a search from the start for AKL to MCI the routing that is showing as available for me to change my existing reservation to is not one of the options to book a new itinerary for, and alternative options are showing at 300k.

 

I'm not sure that it should actually matter but is the new flight in the same RBD (J, I, PZ, etc.) as your current booking or is it a different RBD?

Also, unless I'm mistaken AKL-LAX is only operated by NZ. If the only segments on the reservation are on NZ there may be a restrictive endorsement in play that is preventing automatic reissuance and may prohibit most if not all UA agents from reissuing the same ticket with non-NZ segments. For example, a purely United MP redemption will carry the endorsement "VALID UA ONLY" and since reissued tickets carry the most restrictive endorsement...

Can you just book the new itinerary as a separate reservation and then immediately cancel and redeposit the one you currently have (to avoid the risk of being stuck in the middle without a flight)?
Edit: just saw that you mentioned this is not an option for a new booking so that won't work. If you cancel the existing ticket, especially if it's not UA operated, there is no guarantee that the inventory you currently hold would be returned to availability (immediately or ever)

 

And this is the problem with the change.

Due to the nature of award changes (and there only be one business award fare class I), when you attempt to make a change, it is not an additive process but rather the entire routing is repriced (just as it would be for a cash ticket). But in this case when repricing / revalidated the NZ segment their is no inventory which is required for awards. Yes, understand you already hold space but that is no sufficient for a partner award changes. A few partners will revalidate unchanged existing award space but most will not. You are actually lucky the system failed because if it had gone forward more likely than not you existing reservation will have been lost.

For most partners, you should only attempt an award change if the new itin is presently available as a "new" award, with new award space.

This is a common question in this thread, and you can read of the tale of woe of some that have lost the partner awards attempting to make changes. I hope the error you received is a new practice by UA to prevent lost awards.

This is an unfortunate limitation for awards.

 

All of these replies make sense, which begs the question as to why United presents it as an option for me up until the point of clicking the check out now button. If its not eligible to be changed, don't present it as a route that I'm eligible to change to, allow me to pick seats on the additional flights, and then proceed to check out before presenting the error. I do appreciate all the explanations though, I'll chalk this up to another limitation of airline technology/websites.