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United’s Mileage Plus program has been having a lot of issues with partner awards this year. Back in January, quite a few people noticed that United.com wasn’t showing award availability for a number of its Star Alliance partners despite the fact that other sites (like Aeroplan) were showing that lots of awards seats were up for grabs.
United confirmed that this was some sort of systems issue (and not an intentional blackout of specific partner awards) but it wasn’t until the end of February that some of these partner awards came back online.
Notably absent from the fix were Singapore Airlines awards. If you started an award search on United.com you’d see a warning notice to let you know that Singapore Airlines awards (across all classes) were not available on the United website.
A workaround has been to call United’s phone agents and get them to book the awards but, apart from the fact none of us really likes wasting time calling up an airline, a significant number of agents were telling flyers (erroneously) that they couldn’t book Singapore Airlines awards either.
This has been less than ideal for those of us who like to use United miles for redemptions on Singapore Airlines but, finally (and almost 6 months after the issues began), Singapore Airlines awards are once again available on United.com.
Here are Singapore Airlines awards showing on United.com for travel between Singapore and Hong Kong…
…and here are Singapore Airlines awards showing on United.com for travel between Bangkok and Singapore:
Bottom Line
It’s good to see United finally get Singapore Airlines awards back on in its website (it took them long enough!) as they can offer some the best value awards that can be booked with United’s currency.
With United making it increasingly difficult to book premium cabin saver awards on its own aircraft it’s more important than ever that flyers can see all the award options open to them when they search United.com…let’s hope we don’t see this glitch returning any time soon.
[…] that United.com hasn’t exactly been the most reliable site for award bookings this year (the Singapore Airlines debacle has only just ended) I also checked to see what Aeroplan would offer […]