The new Lifemiles booking engine has major issues- here’s a workaround

Change isn’t always good in the world of miles and points. That’s certainly the case with the new Lifemiles booking engine. The new engine looks cleaner and in theory makes it simpler to change destinations and see an overview of award space availability by date…

But it’s not displaying a ton of Star Alliance partner space, which only a week ago was available on the site via the old engine.

I’ve been researching Singapore to Honolulu award flights for the purposes of another article. Here’s what United’s award engine shows me:

And Aeropan’s award engine:

There are numerous options available, but you’ll note both United and Aeroplan show me SQ600 connecting to OZ 232 and NH802 connecting to UA902.

Here’s what the new Lifemiles engine shows:

Yup, absolutely nothing at all. On any date. It’s not just this route, I’ve searched for a whole lot of flights to North America and Europe and come up with bupkis.

Fortunately, there is a workaround for you to get the old engine (and the corresponding partner space it had available). Simply go to the top of your screen and change country to “Colombia”.

Once that’s done, your booking interface will revert (protip: revert does not mean reply) to the old one.

And you’ll be able to see the same award space that United and Aeroplan have

I’m not sure how long this workaround will exist, however. It appears that Lifemiles is rolling out the new booking engine to more and more geographies. Since partner space is available through the old engine, I’m guessing that Lifemiles doesn’t intend to block it, just that the new engine is having teething issues. Let’s hope this really is the case, or Lifemiles will have just gone down in value.