StarNet
UPDATE: Since United adopted Continental’s reservations system when their merger was completed on March 3, 2012, the airline has insisted it no longer engages in StarNet blocking.
In September 2008, the “On the Fly” column first exposed United Airlines’ previously secret practice of massively blocking “award” seats otherwise made available for mileage redemption by its partners in the global Star Alliance, such as Lufthansa, Thai Airways and Singapore Airlines.
The practice became known as StarNet blocking — a reference to the alliance’s award “middleware” that provides access to those seats by any carrier on a first-come-first-served basis. It caused an uproar and was denounced by loyal United customers as deceitful. In frustration, some of those passengers have turned their backs on United, depriving it of valuable revenue. Some of them canceled corporate contracts with the airline, while others stopped using their United co-branded credit cards.
Apparently, the carrier saves more money by not having to compensate its partners for their “award” seats than it loses by driving some passengers away, so the blocking is still alive and well. Many unsuspecting travelers accumulate thousands of miles in their United Mileage Plus accounts, only to discover later than those miles can’t get them the “award” tickets they hoped to book.
How easy is it for an airline to make its loyal customers happy? Just ask United Airlines. The members of its Mileage Plus program have been happy campers for 10 days, spending their frequent-flier miles like there is no tomorrow.
Many of those travelers waited for that opportunity for months, if not years. They had joined Mileage Plus and mounted sizable accounts with the assumption that they would be able to redeem their miles for flights on the Star Alliance, the global network of 24 carriers of which United is a founding member.
But often in the past few years, when they tried to book “awards” on Singapore Airlines, Germany’s Lufthansa or Asiana of South Korea, among others, finding availability was a Herculean task. Many travelers were angry, but United reservations agents blamed their partners for not providing enough seats…
As if “award” plane tickets aren’t hard enough to come by, airlines are putting even more controls on those coveted seats — in some instances understandable, but in others apparently artificial and questionable.
Most major U.S. carriers are reporting record numbers of issued mileage tickets, but they are not a result of more available seats so much as more passengers rushing to beat rises of redemption mileage levels. As I wrote three weeks ago, the value of frequent-flier miles is dropping, and the airlines want them to be used up because they are a balance-sheet liability.
With most carriers’ domestic capacity shrinking between 5 percent and 16 percent this fall, the number of mileage seats will naturally be reduced as well. Most affected will be the cheapest or “saver” award tickets, such as those requiring 25,000 miles for a domestic coach round trip…
