In our earlier article, Mastering UA Miles (1): Simple One-Way Award Tickets, we introduced how to use the UA website to search for award tickets. At the time, the UA website was still a fairly reliable award search engine. But recently, UA redesigned its website, and the homepage now looks like this:
If you want to search for award tickets, enter the departure date and the origin and destination airports in the “Book Travel” section in the middle, then check “Search for travel.” This process is pretty similar to the old interface discussed in the previous post, so I won’t go over it again here.
So where’s the problem? It’s not the Windows-style modular design, and it’s not the underwhelming UA credit card ad below it. The real issue is the search function itself—the most useful reason to visit the UA website in the first place. What do I mean? Let’s look at a simple one-way ticket from Washington to Beijing in December. If you search using the method above, you get the following result (input on the left, output on the right):
As you can see, nothing looks too different. But what if you want to find a nonstop flight? In Mastering UA Miles (1), Tip 3 explained that in the old interface, you could check “Nonstop Flights Only” and search again to see which dates had nonstop flights available.
But that option is gone in the new interface! Even that might be tolerable—you could just go back to the starting page and enter the following information:
Once “Nonstop” is checked, that should solve the problem, right? So what does the resulting calendar look like?
Believe me, I really didn’t just copy and paste one of the earlier screenshots to fool you T_T the calendar really does look like this. I was pretty excited to see that December 16 supposedly had a nonstop option to Beijing, so I eagerly clicked that date in the calendar—and this was the only nonstop option that appeared:
What happened to Saver Award Economy? Why is there only this ridiculous 80,000-mile redemption left? Still not convinced, I clicked the green December 15 in the calendar:
In other words, the new UA award search interface cannot show which dates actually have nonstop award availability, so you can’t use Tip 3 from the old UA search interface anymore. At this point, some readers may already be missing the old interface. OneMoreDay definitely is.
How to Use the Old Interface to Search
If you don’t want to deal with the frustrating new interface, open Chrome and launch a new Incognito window—just like when you’re trying to pull up certain AMEX credit card Offers. Here’s how:
- Open an Incognito window: Ctrl+Shift+N (Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS) or ⌘-Shift-N (Mac).
- Type ual.com into the address bar, and you should be taken to the old version of the site.
Let’s keep using the same example to review how to search for nonstop award space. First, pick any date and run an award search. Be careful not to check “Nonstop flights only”. In other words, enter the following information in the old booking box:
Click “Search.” On the results page, scroll all the way to the bottom, then check “Nonstop flights only,” as shown in the red box below:
Click “Search” again, and the dates with nonstop flights will appear—no tricks, no gimmicks:
OneMoreDay actually still likes UA’s calendar feature, which can show two months of award availability at once. Unfortunately, the weak performance of the new interface has really taken away from that advantage. Thankfully, we can still use the old page to search for nonstop award tickets—we just don’t know how long this trick will keep working.
If you have any complaints about the new interface, feel free to leave them in the comments below!