Yes. It does suck.
Just kidding… that’s not what I’m talking about. But instead, it’s as good as I predicted. Here is exactly what I said:
Q: Will the routing rules (like stopover rules) change on Feb 1?
A: No. Apparently United doesn’t see the need to let people know about upcoming changes to routing rules, but they do let people know about upcoming award chart prices. Anyways, there’s no correlation between the two.
See many people were worried that the routing rules, specifically “the most powerful zone” concept would get flushed out. But far from it. They can’t even successfully change prices over night.
The routing rules and the way it prices are more complicated things to program. In my opinion, they would need an entirely new pricing system. And since this one does alright with taking control out of the agents’ hands, it’s worth letting me save 10,000 on my way to Sydney.
Still I wanted to give some proof of my findings today.
US to South Africa for 70,000 miles:
Normally a ticket to anywhere in Africa is 80,000 miles, economy roundtrip. The trick here is simply to stopover in Africa and Japan. For whatever reason it will adopt the lower price of 70,000.
US to Australia for 70,000 miles:
Normally a ticket to Australia is also 80,000 miles but combine it with a polynesian island like Fiji and bam, the price is 70,000.
Here’s a big one.
US to the Middle East is now 85,000 miles roundtrip. But combine it with Japan or China and bam:
70,000 miles for IAD – ADD – DXB– PEK – FRA – IAD (stopping at the locations in bold).
Conclusion
So until I can get around to writing a new one, study the old Most Powerful Zone post. Yes, the prices are off, but the list of zones is what we are after. That concept of which zones are on top have not changed, and this post was to prove just that.
The big difference going forward is that SE Asia is now more expensive than North Asia and Japan. So when routing to Asia, think of the second two options and touch Hong Kong or Tokyo instead of Bangkok or Singapore.
Either way, I’m not out of a job when it comes to chasing United tricks. :-p
Nice post. I know many people are ditching UA and moving to AA, but I’m not ready to give up United yet.
I can do both. :-p
Thanks. Yea, I’m not giving up on UA yet.
your South African example does not include all legs – i’ve tried recreating and gotten nothing but errors. what was your route? IAD-NRT-HKG-JNB?
I’m having the same problem. I was trying to do SFO-JNB-TYO-SFO and it would error out each time. Checked availability for each segment individually to find dates that should work, but once I combine it into one it just errors out.
The thing is that you only need to put in the three cities, starting, stop and destination… and then the return – which in my case was the same as the starting.
But the thing is that UA very often gives the error on this route and almost always if you’re not east coast. So it’s an example I found way out in the future. But where it lays over isn’t important.
Either way, if you have a trip within the rules, you can call it in if you find the available leg by leg online.
Hope that helps some!
Yesterday I thought they’d fixed the USA-AUS (Oceania) thing, but this post gave me an idea… and the idea turned out right. It still works, but some things that used to be allowed are now not. If you do those things, Australia takes control.
I’ve noticed some weird things on pacific routes. I may have mentioned a time that via asia to perth priced different than via asia to sydney. Couldn’t figure out why but apparently there are some other things in the algorithm.
Not sure if this was the case before, but Hong Kong and Macau are both now considered South Asia.
Right. Forgot. That is annoying.
Hong Kong is definitely in South Asia.
I always fly to Shenzhen when I go back to Hong Kong.
Shenzhen is in China and is considered as North Asia.
The best value that I have been using is Japan – North Asia for 10000 miles one way. Unfortunately, it is gone. 🙁
You’re right HKG is South Asia.
Yea, there are almost no positive changes on this chart.
Because of devaluation,
I have booked
3 J tickets from HKG to TBU with a stopover in BKK
2 J tickets from HKG to RAR with a stopover in SYD
1 J ticket from WKJ to RAR to NRT with a stopover in SYD
1 J ticket from HND to NAN to NRT (stop) – SDJ.
all for 330000 UA miles.
It is very sad that 40000 miles Japan-South Pacific is gone.
I still have a few NZ destinations in south pacific that I have yet to visit including NOU, and a few others. I hope to do those once a year…. (before the next devalution kicks it, and probably in Y for 25000 miles round trip.)
Actually I was going to pull the trigger on the Japan to Oceania but didn’t. And when NOU came on pointbreaks I was really optimistic but there were no seats on NZ. None. So I ended up doing nothing.
Great post, thanks for testing these routes, especially South Africa! I’m curious how you get your mileage totals, because, like @Ryan and @Aaron, I only get error messages when I try to put a full trip together.
Well, I’ve played around with United so much I kind of know what things do and don’t work. In this case JNB and NRT are hubs. And starting from the east coast is the only thing that works. And I search like 10 months in advanced.
Sometimes try different dates.
Again, west coast tickets on this route don’t show up and pretty much only get an error.
So I basically pick the shortest routes that would touch the same regions.
As a data point – I’ve test priced some routes to NAN from various asia…japan remains an absolute STEAL in coach!
12.5k/30k japan
15k/25k china
22.5k/35k se asia
SE Asia has definitely up from 15k. But you’re right, these are definitely good deals.
I fully expect to due one of these routes again. It’s unfortunate Hong Kong isn’t China on their pricing. But maybe we’ll start from China.