How to Use the United Airlines Search Engine to Find More Award Flights

ByThe Miles Professor

I like the United Airlines search engine. It’s my go-to engine when I want to use United Miles, Lufthansa Miles or when US Airways used to be a member of Star Alliance and I wanted to use those miles. It will show most Star Alliance partner availability and it will even find connections. However, it does have its limits. If you’re giving it easy searches like New York to Paris or Chicago to Frankfurt, it will generally give you back accurate availability. But if you’re going to give it a tougher search like “Belgrade to Los Angeles” or “Prague to Detroit”, it will give up before going through every combination and give limited results. In this post, I’ll explain how to get more results and find the award space to slightly obscure cities.

The other night, one of my favorite cousins called me needing to book a flight from Detroit to Berlin and return from Prague a week later. When he searched, nothing came up and he was convinced there was no hope except to pay $1700… and, of course, I had to tell him he was doing it wrong.

How To Search for Award Availability

When he typed in Detroit to Berlin, the search engine had no problem finding all availability for the single-connection Lufthansa flights Detroit-Frankfurt, Frankfurt-Berlin. Alas, that was not available on the day he wanted to go. What he didn’t find his search was a two-connection mixed airline award space: Detroit – Toronto on Air Canada, Toronto to Frankfurt on Air Canada, Frankfurt to Berlin on Lufthansa.

If you know how to search, finding these tickets is actually not very difficult as long as you do it in two steps

  1. Searching Detroit to Frankfurt came up with a flight Detroit – Toronto, Toronto – Frankfurt on Air Canada.
  2. Searching Frankfurt to Berlin gave a flight nearly every hour that he could then connect to from Frankfurt.

The same thing for Prague to Detroit. Unless there’s space on the flight on Lufthansa connecting in Frankfurt, it’s going to be difficult for the search engine to come up with availability. So what I did was I searched through London in two steps and found the flights:

  1. Prague – Munich on Lufthansa, Munich – London on Lufthansa,
  2. London to Chicago on United, Chicago to Detroit on United.

How to Book The Award

When searching, the first leg comes up at 15,000 miles while the second leg comes up at 30,000 miles. Don’t pay attention to those prices. You will not have to pay 45,000 miles for the one-way. As long as there is no connection over 24 hours, flying from the US to Europe will cost 30,000 miles each way for all the flights pieced together. The one unfortunate thing is you have to call United Customer Service at 1-800-864-8331 and give them the flights you found to book the award. You should search them ahead of time, write down all the flight numbers and not rely on the agent to do this.

Tips for Searching

I’ve found with recent searches that London tends to have among the better award availability going across the Atlantic ocean. Mainly because it’s such a big business hubs and there are just so many flights there every day at so many times. The other things is that transit taxes through London are a bit on the high side so people tend to avoid it for connections. It’s a good idea to have as few connections as possible and keep taxes as low as possible, but when tickets cost $1700, you want to explore all the options you can.

If you’re flying between obscure cities and award space is not coming up, the best thing to do is to break up your search into two steps and piece it together so that the times work out. I prefer to search to big hub cities with a lot of travel such as London, Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna or ones with non-stop flights across the Atlantic ocean on United like Milan, Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam. When you’re willing to get creative with your routings and help the search engine widen your search, you can often get the United search engine to give you a lot more availability than you see on the surface. Award space is there – you just have to know where to look for it!

15 Comments

  1. Have you ever used the ANA award search engine? It’s a little less sexy, aka no calendar, etc.

    Most hardcore award searchers would agree that the ANA engine trumps all in the *A world.

    1. It is good for searching by segments, yes. But most people don’t like it and, unless I am willing to do all my cousin’s searches in the future, it’s not something I can tell him about :)

      1. I worked w/ANA a bunch & hate it. Unwieldy & tiresome. Booked a recent trip on UA.

        1. I’m not a fan of the ANA search engine either. If you don’t have any ANA miles, you can’t see award space (yes there is that trick but I think it’s too much clicking.)

    2. I agree with Travis here…ANA is widely held as the best search engine for Star Alliance award availability for simple and complex itineraries. It’s pretty user friendly, so I think you may be selling your cousin short here.

      1. Trust me :) I already know how these things go… I tried to suggest using British Airways website to search for Cathay availability to Asia. The response was calling customer service and becoming convinced he had to pay 100,000 miles for the trip in economy. If it takes more than 10 minutes, it’s just not happening!

  2. What if one leg is using a saver reward and the other is using standard? How would they calculate the miles for that?

  3. We are actually doing something like that this summer. Coming home from Copenhagen we fly Air Canada to Toronto, Toronto to Chicago and then Chicago to Detroit.

  4. I’ve actually booked the multi-segment oneway trip on ua.com – then used the ‘paypal’ trick to put it on hold – and then called UA to adjust the price and pay. This way you can be sure the space doesn’t go away while you are on hold.

  5. If you’re flying JFK-FRA or IAH-DME, don’t forget about Singapore Airlines. Unfortunately the UA search engine doesn’t show SQ award availability but you should be able to redeem on Singapore airlines economy & business class using UA mileageplus miles.

  6. I have been booking my international trips to Israel through United, (which is a star alliance partner). Unfortunately, I can only book those star alliance partners that United offers for the dates I want. I transfer Chase UR points to United and then proceed to my booking. Is there any way of using these same points to book on any of the other star alliance airlines if united does not list them for availability? United has told me that they can only book flights that the star alliance partners have made available to them (United).
    Any comments? Is there a way around this?

    1. If you’re going to use United miles, you can only book the Star Alliance award seats that the partners have made available to them. Some partners give some better award options to their own members and this is the case for Lufthansa, Swiss and Singapore Airlines. You can transfer your Ultimate Rewards points to Singapore airlines, which flies from New York to Frankfurt, and then use further partners to fly to Israel. However, it’s not clear how much this may help.

  7. Good advice but you missed one important tip. When searching for award space change Number of Flights to Display option from Default to 50. It will give you more options for connecting flights, etc.

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