Easing the United upgrade search a wee bit

Thanks to the rather customer-unfriendly move this weekend by United Airlines it is rather more difficult to identify flights with upgrade inventory available. The good news is that it is still possible on the United website; it just requires a bunch more clicks. My aversion to extra clicks has motivated me to try to solve that problem a little bit. And, like I often do, I’ve turned to my good friend GreaseMonkey.

The search process involves choosing the Advanced Search option:

Then checking the box at the bottom to search for upgrades:

Then selecting the individual segments:

Then checking the results:

It isn’t much, but the new GreaseMonkey script I’ve got will let you skip that page which asks which segments you’re interested in. I honestly have no idea why United asks anyways rather than just searching for the whole trip from the get-go but they do. Load up this script and after you submit the advanced form it will just jump straight to the search results. Also, if you want to force the site to only show GPU-eligible fare classes as part of the Advanced Search page check out the instructions here.

It isn’t as easy as I wish it could be, but it is a bit more streamlined. Hopefully it is helpful to some folks. Like always, my test case handling is likely poor so it may not work for everyone. If you have trouble let me know and I’ll try to figure it out.

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10 Comments

Thanks Seth!

Thanks. Can you make the “(R)” stand out in a different color or font size as you did with the previous script? That might help to spot the upgradable flights when scanning the results.

Doesn’t work unless your billing address is the USA.

Again Seth comes through!
And without promoting a credit card sign up !!!

Seth, Is there a good way to view inventory for Y, B, M upgrades? I think it was PN or P bucket?

Seth says:

11 September 2012 at 11:33 am

Y-Ups come from JN inventory which is the same as whatever is for sale in the forward cabin; tracking that shouldn’t be too hard.

For B/M-Ups you need PN which tracks very close to P. You can query that using this tool: http://www.wandr.me/Tools/Single_Bucket_Inventory.aspx.

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Is this still working? All my other GM scripts are working fine but this one has stopped working. Ive removed and re-installed.

I’ll check to see if this one is working or not. In the meantime, they did put Expert Mode back online so the better version is possible if you approach it that way. It requires a setting in your personal profile but otherwise should work well.