United Expanded Award Availability
Several of United's cobranded credit cards include access to expanded award availability. This expanded award availability is a popular reason to keep or open a United card. What does this benefit really mean, though? The expanded award availability claims to give cardholders and elite status members with additional awards at saver pricing. I was wondering how useful this benefit really was, and how much availability it grants. I decided to put it to the test. In this article I will share the questions this raised for me, and why I think this perk is less like a gold rush and more like fool's gold.
Which Cards Include United Expanded Award Availability
Interestingly, United has some quirks as it relates to which cards have access to this benefit. Firstly, all of the United cards EXCEPT for the Gateway have access to the expanded award access. This includes both the personal, and the business credit cards. It's a bit odd that they single out the Gateway card, but given that it is a no annual fee card, it makes sense to give it less benefits. However, this is where it gets a bit weird. The United Gateway card also has access to the expanded award access if you downgrade to it from another card. What does this mean in actuality? It means opening the Gateway directly does not give access, but downgrading to it does. A likely guess as to why is that United's IT simply doesn't know how to switch off the access for product changes.
How Things Should Work
So let's talk about how things should work. The card perk should give access to additional awards that are priced at saver pricing for United's own flights. This means that a flight that would cost 15,000 miles should cost 15,000 via the expanded award availability. One would think that with this perk it would be quite valuable, and flights that are not available to regular members are available to cardholders. Further, United uses certain fare codes to distinguish this availability. ‘X' is the fare code for saver economy flights which are available to partners for booking. ‘XN' is the fare code for expanded award availability economy flights.
Where Things Start to Go Wrong
My research into this ToPic was fully prompted by a recurring discussion we have been seeing over in the ToP Facebook Group. You see, members have been reporting seeing saver “X” fare code flights when reviewing United's website, but not able to book these flights via other star alliance partners. This indicates that these flights are not actually ‘saver' awards. What has been odd about these scenarios, is that each and every time when I verify the availability these members have been troubleshooting, it shows as ‘XN' on my United account. In these cases, the member seeing ‘X' has no United card, while I do have a United card and am seeing ‘XN'.
Questions This Prompted
This brought me to conclude that the awards are not true savers, and rather United is referring to saver awards in different ways than award travelers. Further, this prompted me to question if non-cardholders are still benefiting from the expanded award availability. Why are they seeing ‘X' fare code on a flight that is clearly showing ‘XN' on my searches? Is United trying to pull a fast one over on us? If non-cardholders are getting access to some of the expanded award availability, was it to just some? Is there any benefit at ALL to this cardholder benefit?
Researching The United Expanded Award Availability
In order to get to the bottom of this United mystery, I enlisted the help of ToP team member Brian. For anyone who does not know him, Brian is an award whiz. Brian also happens to not have a United card, which was perfect for experimenting with two accounts: one that has access to the expanded awards, and one that does not. To put our experiment to the test, we needed to have a good sample size. I located 9 total flights on various routes, dates, and times that had ‘XN' awards showing on my account, and punted them over to Brian to verify on his account. Below is a summary of our findings:
As you can see from our findings, 8 out of 9 expanded award availability was also available to Brian, the non-cardholder. In only one case, was Brian not able to access one of the awards I had access to. The next question we asked was did Brian have access to fewer of the awards than I. In one case, I had access to 4 tickets at the reduced rate while Brian had access to only 3. Lastly, I wanted to verify would true saver awards available via partners show as ‘X' fare code on my account. This is because if it did, that would mean the true way to verify if a United flight has saver awards would be a) searching via a partner or b) searching on United via a cardholder's account. Unfortunately, a flight that was available via Air Canada was still pulling ‘XN' on my United account.
Reaching Some Conclusions (Kinda)
Unfortunately, there are still some unanswered questions here. Why are awards showing as “X” fare class but not showing to partners? Why do the same awards show on cardholders accounts as “XN” fare class? Are these two things related? My answer is, I think so. While we didn't get to an exact science and clear cut answer, it is clear to me that the expanded award availability isn't as valuable as it appears to be. In 8 out of 9 instances, a non-cardholder had access to the same awards, just labeled as ‘X'. Because of this, the value of the United card benefit is significantly hampered in my opinion. In 1 case, I did have access to an additional flight, and in one more case I had an extra ticket available at saver rates. But all in all, this isn't enough for me to deem it of any significant value.
