united.com
 

Has anyone use the multicity function for booking a trip on united.com, just to force a connection through a certain city (not because you are actually traveling to multiple cities, but because you want to connect in a specific city). Up until a few weeks ago I could plug in the city pairs BOS to HNL on united.com and the site would show me all the flights to HNL-- now it only will show me flights connecting via ORD-- I want to connect via SFO or LAX. It does not matter what dates I plug in- in still will only show via ORD, even though I know there are other valid connections available. If I were to book using the multicity function, would the flights (BOS/SFO SFO/HNL) still be recognized as a connection by United and luggage be checked through without having to ask etc or would the computer view that as 2 separate flights since I had to "force" the connection through the multicity function? Has anyone created their own connections this way? What was the result?

I've never used the multicity function that way, and you may have already done this, but have you searched by schedule rather than price? I just tried it, picking dates and times at random, and it did show me a flight connecting through LAX.

I have never used the multicity function to force a certain connection, but many times I used the function that allowed me to increase the number of options displayed so as to see other connecting flights. Unfortunately, United removed this option from the full flight search recently.

There is a way to increase the number of options displayed to some extent. It is a little complicated to explain, but I'll try...

Go to the full flight search and type in your round-trip itinerary and dates (don't use multicity). Select the "search by schedule" button, then "search." When the search results come back, you'll probably just see two or three choices. Now, go up to the very long URL and look for the part of the URL that says, "air_avail=10" -- it is probably somewhere in the middle. Click in the URL box, change the 10 to 20, then refresh or hit enter (don't go much higher than 20, or it messes up the search). It will search again, but should come back with more options than the first search. I tried this for random BOS-HNL dates and saw some connections through LAX, DEN, and SFO.

Otherwise, it might be worth calling United and just paying the small fee to book with an agent if you have a particular itinerary in mind.

yup, tried searching by schedule. It just won't pull anything up except ORD connections (at least leaving in the early am-- 6am) Weird

Great-- thank you. I tried what ms_go said and it worked! Thanks!

Excellent! Glad it worked for you.

You'd think United would want to make it as easy as possible to see all the options for flying on its planes. Go figure....