Upgraded Points notes an odd phenomenon on united.com: more United MileagePlus partner awards appear by making one small adjustment to the settings.

Glitch? More Partner Award Space With United MileagePlus After One Easy Adjustment To Settings

Partner awards are increasingly elusive across all alliances as carriers move toward restricting award space to their own loyalty program members. Even so, there is still some partner award redemptions available, though these tend to be few and far between.

But in the case of United MileagePlus, more partner awards may be available simply by changing your location–an easy adjustment on the united.com homepage.

For example, on June 21st, if you search from New York (JFK) to Frankfurt (FRA) on United’s US page, you see no space:

But change the page from US to Canada and voila, you see Singapore Airlines has space in business class:

I’ve been able to replicate this across numerous dates…

Upgraded Points also reports this “trick” works for LOT Polish Airlines.

Deliberate Point-Of-Sale Booking Restriction Or Technical Glitch?

It’s too early to tell whether this award filtering is deliberate or unintentional.

Years ago, United engaged in “StarNet blocking” and filtered out certain partner award space. This space was sometimes bookable over the phone by asking agents to do a manual request or “need-need” for the flight in question, but that was quite hard since United restricted its agents from doing so.

I suspect this is unintentional, but it also would not surprise me if it is intentional: after all business class round-trip tickets that originate in the USA tend to be far more expensive than those that originate in Europe (or other points outside the USA). Why? Because airlines (not just US airlines but all of them) have determined that travelers originating from the US are willing to pay more.

We could well be seeing that United is masking some partner space because it feels no need to make it available from a US point of sale. With so many miles floating around, United may prefer to offload some of its mileage liability by only offering higher-priced mileage seats.

CONCLUSION

A curious thing is happening on united.com: you can find more award space using your MileagePlus miles–at least on Singapore Airlines and LOT Polish–by changing your location to another country like Canada.

Have you seen this before? Have you found any other carriers this “trick” works for?