If you’ve attempted to work with United’s New Award Search Tool, you know how much of a pain it is.

Perhaps the most prevalent screen is this:

United’s New Award Search Tool

Now, some in the software industry would call this a feature. I would call this one of my most vexing customer experiences.

What causes the issue with United’s New Award Search Tool?

The easy answer is, if you do a search, then you chance anything but the date, you get the above error.

So how do you fix it? 

You can’t.

But, in the software development industry–at least the one I work in–we like to offer mitigation techniques, or even better, workarounds.

So, your workaround for this particular issue is going back to the united.com site and starting again. The good news is, that United.com should retain the itinerary you were trying to find. So when you go back to the home screen, it should have pre-populated like this:

The positive news is that if you go back to this “home” screen, you should be able to click “search” and get what you were looking to search before the error message.

Overall, there are significant challenges to consistent, easy searches on United’s New Award Search Tool. While this post doesn’t lay out a solution to avoid the errors all together, hopefully the mitigation strategy offered is at least something that reduces your frustration.