How to search for United and US Airways miles flights availability

In our ongoing series on the best websites for finding award space, today we focus on the Star Alliance. You’ve typically seen me use United.com for searching both United and US Airways award space. This is because United has a very good search engine for the most part. But where United’s site falls short is when there are a lot of options to fly between two cities that are not directly connected.  United only displays the first few search results in this case, making it difficult to know whether you’re actually looking at all the options available to you.

Normally this is where ANA comes in handy. ANA has the most comprehensive Star Alliance award search engine around, but it is not the easiest system to use, especially if you don’t have any ANA miles, which quite understandably you might not. Fortunately, for United and US Airways, a there is another Star Alliance search engine, Air Canada’s Aeroplan. Here is a step-by-step guide to finding the flights you’re looking for on United and US Airways:

1.   Sign up for Aeroplan here

2.   Go to Aeroplan’s award travel booking site here and log in

3.   Enter your travel information in the screen below that appears after login. Choose “My dates are flexible”

4.   In the calendar that appears, choose the dates with availability (these dates have Saver-level space on United and/or US Airways). Click “Search with new dates” if your dates have changed, or scroll below the calendar if they haven’t.

5.   Scroll below the calendar. In the list that appears should be pretty much every US Airways and United option available to you. The mileage cost may not be correct in all cases, but click “Show details” next to the flights you want and take note of each flight number. I’ve done a one-way here to illustrate.

For United miles users

6.   Go to the United Multi-Destination search here and enter each leg of the trip as a separate flight. Choose “Award Travel” at the bottom of the page before searching

7.   Select each of the flights you had found on Aeroplan’s website

For US Airways miles users

If you are using US Airways miles to book flights on United, you will need to call US Airways at 800-428-4322 because the US Airways website does not show partner availability. Ask them to waive the phone fee because you can’t book the flight online.

If you are using US Airways miles to book flights on US Airways, go to the travel search link here, choose the “Award Travel” tab, and search for the flights using the beginning city as “From” and the destination city as “To”. US Airways’ search engine should come up with the flight options you had found on Aeroplan.