If you’re trying to book an Air India award seat using your United MileagePlus miles, you’re not going to find space…it’s all blocked.

All Air India Award Space Blocked Via United MileagePlus

This award space blocking is unrelated to the Air India 787-8 crash that occurred earlier this week, as this blocking has been ongoing for quite some time. You might recall that I recently booked an Emirates award for next year out of Mumbai, which will give me a chance to not only offer updated reviews of first class on Emirates, but also check out India again (I’m looking beyond Mumbai, if anyone has suggestions).

On the way to India, I wanted to fly Air India business class on the A350-900. This was my plan before the deadly accident and remains my plan after the deadly accident…at least at this point, I have no safety concerns flying on Air India.

Here’s an example of the Delhi – Mubai route. On March 1st, Air Canada has plenty of space on Air India:

Meanwhile, United has no space:

In fact, I cannot find a single date with a single flight with Air India award space via United.

Yes, award space is capacity-controlled, but Air India does not release different saver award space to different partners and thus it appears that United is deliberately blocking this space from its MileagePlus members.

I’ve not been successful booking this over the phone, so it’s not like there is hidden space either (like back in the day when you had to call American Airlines to book JAL or Cathay Pacific award space).

I’m sure we’ll see some comments below about United doing us a favor by blocking this space (Air India’s reputation was not great even before the latest crash), but Air India is a critical Star Alliance partner in terms of offering dots on the map and blocking all award space on Air India leaves a big hole on the Inidan Suabcontinent.

Finally, this is not the first time this has happened. We saw something similar in 2019, which United blamed on technological limitations.

CONCLUSION

I’ve sent a note to United and will update this post with an answer as to what is going on. While I understand why most of you are perfectly happy to avoid Air India, blocking this Star Alliance partner is problematic: United should not be blocking the award space of any partner. Perish the thought that MileagePlus starts becoming like Avianca LifeMiles, which routinely blocks partner award space…

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top image: Air India A350-900 business class