Last night reader H. e-mailed that United was extending their old award chart by a few days, not yet implementing their newly devalued award chart pricing until February 3.
Matthew is reporting the same thing: the new award chart doesn’t go into effect until Monday.
We don’t know what time on Monday but my best guess is the beginning of the business day in Chicago. It’s possible, of course, that it could happen earlier.
I can only imagine that they weren’t able to handle the IT and customer service functions related to the change properly and needed all hands on deck when they made the switchover — which in some sense is hard to believe because they announced the change three months ago and have had ample time to prepare, and they’ve certainly made award chart changes before.
Still, any reprieve on this — even a brief one — is welcome as there are certainly folks who were down to the wire but can now take advantage of the weekend to book award tickets at a lower rate.
Apparently if you wanted the new award chart on February 1 to book one of the handful of awards that’s getting less expensive, you can book it now at the old higher rate and then within 10 business days they’ll refund you the difference.
I still have about half a million United miles left after burning through a bunch, and I’m not trying to get myself close to zero. However, if you’re looking for ways to make the most of the miles pre-devaluation, now that you have the weekend to do it, here’s how.
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you can still act now, go to United FB & twitter page to voice your outrage and disappoinment over the extreme 87% increase devaluation!
I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that the site won’t be able to price mixed partner/UA awards come Feb 3rd. Or that we’ll have any more clarification on what changes will result in a reprice.
*ding ding ding* DBest is a winner!
Right now the United site does not display _any_ *A partner availability. Let’s see how long this takes for them to fix.
I booked a trip at 10pm last night with Thai A380 First FRA-BKK and Asiana B747 First ICN-FRA. It appears to have ticketed, but I wonder if it will get repriced if I try to tweak some of the (less than ideal) connecting segments…. right now I can’t do anything, anyway.
Thanx Gary. Great and helpful info, as always.