Travel Is Free summarized United’s ‘award routing rules’.

Award tickets have basically two components — the number of miles that they cost (and that can be based on the region you are flying from and to — most US programs price awards based on regions — or the number of miles you fly, some international programs offer ‘distance-based’ award charts) and the ‘routing rules’ or the way you’re able to fly.

Distance-based awards don’t usually have very many routing rules, for the most part you can fly however you want between your cities. After all, the more miles you fly, the more out of the way you travel, you’ll simply pay more miles for the award.

You may not be able to transit the same city more than twice, you may only be allowed a certain number of flights, but roughly speaking you’ll be able to piece together whatever flights you wish.

With a zone or region-based program — like United, Delta, and US Airways offer, and like American offers for their one-way partner awards (American also has distance-based awards for travel on its oneworld partners) — you need to understand the rules:

• Can you fly one-way or only roundtrip?
  
• You you have a ‘stopover’ or even two extra cities that you’ll visit along the way to or back from your destination?
  
• Can you have an ‘open jaw’ (fly into one city and out of another, getting between the two on your own)?
  
• How many segments can you fly? Some programs may limit you to 8 segments in the whole itinerary, or even 3 or 4 in each direction.
  
• Can you connect in an ‘out of the way’ region on the way to your destination — for instance, can you fly from the US to South America to get to Sydney?

Three years ago I wrote an extensive guide to booking awards using US Airways Dividend Miles. This contained all of the ‘rules’ for booking these awards.

But with US Airways, the thing to understand is that agents are the ones who determine if your award meets the rules, which means it is their understanding (or lack of understanding) that says whether or not you can book something. If any agent doesn’t know about a rule, for all intents and purposes on that call it doesn’t exist. If an agent makes up a rule, you need to talk to a different agent. (The same holds true for an agent who knows about a rule you don’t like.)

With United, the reverse it true. The computer is the rule.

If there’s one basic thing we know about United’s award rules, it’s that one stopover and two open-jaws are permitted on roundtrip international awards.

And we also know that even that could change, and in typical United fashion they are completely unclear how they will change or to what:

A stopover is permitted on roundtrip award travel only. One stopover is permitted, unless otherwise noted. Additional mileage may be required for Saver Awards within the continental U.S., Alaska and Canada. For travel booked on or after February 1, 2014, a stopover is permitted only on certain roundtrip itineraries. Additional mileage may be required.

United’s award travel rules do not say how you can route your award, or how many segments you can fly. They used to offer contradictory statements and meaningless statements regarding stopovers and circle trips, language that has since been removed. So what we know is based on trial and error. This can be frustating.

But here’s the key thing to understand about United’s award rules:

United has some routing rules, but mostly it’s “whatever the computer will price” and the computer will price things that it shouldn’t, and sometimes won’t price things that it should.

When the computer fails, agents will usually make up rules/reasons why the computer did it (assuming the computer is right). Legacy Continental agents are reluctant to ever question the computer. United agents are taught not to.
It’s agents searching for justifications for what the computer has done that gives rise to confusion over award rules (lots of false explanations given by agents).

All in all, United’s rules are opaque (where they even exist) but in 90% of cases that accrues to the benefit of frequent flyers.

Occasionally we are told we cannot do things that we think we ought to be able to based on past history and other similar awards. But the fallacy there is in assuming there are consistent rules consistently enforced. And when we can’t do something, it’s usually something many other programs wouldn’t permit either.

On the whole, we do quite well by United’s rules.

• US Airways has a rule that you can only have a stopover in a Star Alliance hub city (or at one of their international destinations, presumably meant to suggest you could do that if and only if flying US Airways to that destination). United has no such rule. US Airways also only permits roundtrip awards (or roundtrip pricing on one way awards).

• Delta doesn’t do one-way awards for half the price of coach. You can fly to Australia via Asia but their pricing engine simply breaks when combining various partners or routing even flights on Delta that should be permissable.

• American requires there be a published fare between your origin and destination on the primary overwater carrier for your trip in order to book the ticket as a single award. No published fare, you’re going to be looking at two awards and more miles.

• Aeroplan generously offers two stopovers or one stopover and an open jaw, but limits flying to 5% more than the published ‘maximum permitted mileage’ between your origin and destination. United doesn’t validate your miles flown against traditional limits.

So if all of a sudden they start to limit the number of segments you can fly on one-way awards from the US to Asia flying via Europe — that could be an unpublished rule change, or an unintended consequence of a computer tweak. But remember that American doesn’t permit flying from the US to Asia via Europe on a single one-way award at all.

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