Miracles Do Happen: United Fixes Their Nonstop Saver Award Calendar!

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2 weeks ago I wrote an in-depth piece about how to work around a massive United.com bug that was causing the website to hide expanded award availability for cardholders and elites.

United fixed their website the day after I published the article, but the information there is still relevant and helpful for award searches.

In that post I wrote, “However United’s website, which replaced the excellent legacy Continental website nearly 2 years ago, is extremely buggy. It also stripped out functionality that used to work. For example while the award calendar has an option to only show nonstop saver award dates, it doesn’t actually work. That critical functionality worked perfectly on the old site, but on the new site you need to manually check each date to see if the nonstop flight has saver award space. Talk about 1 step forward and 2 steps back!”

And indeed, even in the post update on that post I wrote, “Now, when can we discuss fixing the nonstop award calendar glitch?”

In fact I’ve been asking United about this since August 2015. in this post when I asked people to like and retweet:

@United Please Fix These Critical Award Searching Issues Before Phasing Out Your Old Sitehttp://t.co/Mg6lDAwzXC

— DansDeals (@DansDeals) August 5, 2015

I’ve written to United several times since then, but had pretty much given up hope until today when I discovered that United has finally fixed the nonstop saver award calendar!

Since United killed the old Continental.com legacy website, if you want to find which dates have saver award seats from say, Newark to Los Angeles, you had to manually click on each date. Even if you checked “nonstop” it didn’t change what the calendar displayed.

But now you can just click “nonstop” on the home page under “Search for award travel.”  In general it’s a good idea to search for one-way at a time.

On the search results page you now have to click on “Show award availability calendar”

And voila, the calendar now only shows dates that have nonstop saver award availability:

Here’s a route with some great summertime award space in all cabins:

With this change you can quickly locate nonstop saver award space. If you are a cardholder or elite and are logged in on United.com then you will see dates that have expanded award space as well.

Note that you may have to go back to the United.com home page to make a new nonstop award search. If you change the search parameters from the search results page then it may not display the nonstop award calendar.

Some routes seem to get buggy if you search for award space past next February and don’t properly show nonstop award space on the calendar, but hopefully that will get fixed as well.

Kudos United and let’s hope that it stays this way!