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For a number of weeks United MileagePlus members desiring to use their miles on Star Alliance partners TAP and Thai Airways were unable to do so. United pulled the award availability for both of these partners, and it has been a full six weeks or so that members have been unable to book these awards.

Well, the good news is that both Thai and TAP have been restored to the system. You can now once again use your MileagePlus miles to book these awards. I spent a few minutes looking for some departures, and had no trouble at all finding award space on Thai nonstop between Bangkok and London.

a screenshot of a business award

While not a good of a deal as it used to be, flying Thai First class between Australia/NZ and Japan is still one of the best options if you want to experience this cabin. Awards between these regions cost 65,000 miles in first class.

Singapore still not showing, but I don’t care

Considering that Singapore doesn’t make the best of its long-haul space available to any of its partners, this really isn’t a big loss. If you’re looking to book a Singapore award from LAX to SIN, or maybe the fifth freedom route from SFO to HKG (SEE: 5 fifth freedom flights I’m highly interested in flying), or even the longest flight in the world between EWR and SIN, you’ll have to do this directly through Singapore with their own miles in every case.

Singapore makes some long(ish) segments available to United, such as Singapore to Perth, Australia, but the routes available are almost always on their A330 with angled-flat seats. Not exactly the crème de la crème redemption you might be looking for. Still, it could be useful if it gets you somewhere you want to go and you can mix the award with another StarAlliance carrier.

Image courtesy of Masakatsu Ukon via Flickr under CC BY-SA 2.0 license


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