United's New 2026 Routes Are on Sale: Ticket Prices, Deals & How to Book

United spent 2026 adding routes — ten new launches announced between April and June, from Croatia to Colombia to the north island of Japan. Most of the coverage says they are “on sale”. That is true, and it does not mean what it sounds like.

Here is every route, which ones you can still book before they start, and why nobody can tell you what any of them costs.

What are United’s new routes for 2026?

Ten route launches, announced in three batches between April and June. Six have already started flying. The other four begin between October and December.

Already flying

Still to come

Santiago in the first table is Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Four of the five European routes launched from Newark inside a four-week window in spring. That is a summer programme, and by late August it is closer to its end than its beginning.

Does “on sale” mean United tickets are discounted?

No. It means you can buy them. This is airline usage rather than retail usage, and the two are easy to confuse.

United’s Caracas announcement puts it plainly: “tickets are on sale now on United’s website and mobile app”. The Cartagena announcement says “Flights are available for sale on United.com and the United app.” Neither sentence contains a price, a percentage or an end date, because neither is describing a promotion. They are telling you the route has loaded into the booking system.

If you arrived expecting a launch fare, there isn’t one — not on these routes and not on United’s deals pages, which is covered further down.

Which new United routes have not started yet?

Four launches, covering three destinations, between October and December. These are the only ones where booking ahead is still possible.

Chicago to Tokyo-Narita starts in October as a daily year-round service. United says it is the only U.S. airline flying the route, and that Narita is now served from six of its seven continental hubs.

San Francisco to Sapporo runs three times a week from December through March. This is the one with a genuine first attached to it: United says it is the first nonstop service from the continental United States to Sapporo. It is a winter-season route, aimed squarely at the skiing on Hokkaido.

Cartagena gets two launches on the same day, 17 December, from Houston and from Washington Dulles. Both are year-round, four flights a week each, on a Boeing 737, and United says it is the first U.S. airline to fly nonstop to Cartagena from either hub. Lonely Planet named the city a 2026 Best in Travel destination.

How much do tickets on the new United routes cost?

Nobody can tell you, including United. There is no launch fare, no published price and no fare table for any of these routes. Seats are priced dynamically, so the number depends on the date you fly, the date you look and how full the aircraft already is.

That is not a gap in the reporting. It is what airline pricing is, and any article giving you a single figure for a route like Chicago to Tokyo is quoting one search on one day.

What you can do is compare the same search across dates, since a route flying three or four times a week has far fewer departures to choose between than a daily one — and on Sapporo, the whole service only exists between December and March.

Does United have a deals page for these routes?

It has a deals page. It does not have deals on it. United’s travel deals page advertises “discounts on over 4,500 flights to 300+ destinations” and then prints no prices whatsoever — not one dollar figure on the page.

What it actually offers is a set of links: a search tool organised by departure hub, MileagePlus member offers, promotional certificates, vacation package bundles and military fares. None of it is route-specific and none of the new routes appear on it.

One condition on that page is worth reading before you assume a cheap fare is a good one: special offer prices are nonrefundable except in the first 24 hours after purchase, and may need to be bought in advance.

How do you book a new United route?

On united.com or in the United app, which is what both announcements point to and the only channel either names.

Two practical notes for the routes that have not started. Search a date after the launch date or the route will not appear at all — Sapporo will return nothing for November, and Cartagena nothing before 17 December. And check the days of the week: four of the ten run three or four times weekly rather than daily, so the calendar will have gaps that look like sold-out days but are not.

One thing not to assume: neither announcement mentions a launch fare, a promotional code or a booking deadline, so there is nothing to rush for beyond the seats themselves.

Which new routes are already flying?

Six, and five of them are the European summer programme. Split, Bari, Glasgow and Santiago de Compostela all launched from Newark between 30 April and 27 May; Reykjavik launched from Washington Dulles on 21 May with what United says is the only lie-flat business class on the route.

The sixth is Houston to Caracas, which started on 11 August. That one is a restoration rather than a new destination — United flew between the United States and Venezuela for more than twenty years before suspending the service in June 2017.

United also brought back six seasonal routes from its 2025 expansion this year: Ulaanbaatar from Tokyo-Narita, Faro, Madeira, Palermo and Bilbao from Newark, and Nuuk in Greenland.

How big is United’s 2026 network?

Thirty-six European destinations, fourteen of which no other U.S. carrier serves. That is United’s own count for 2026, alongside nearly 770 weekly transatlantic round trips in the summer schedule and up to 210 flights a day to Europe at peak times.

The Latin American side is built around Houston, which United says handles up to 100 flights a day to more than 50 destinations in Latin America and the Caribbean. Japan is the other concentration: this winter the airline expects up to 13 flights a day from the continental U.S. to Sapporo, Narita, Haneda and Osaka.

Patrick Quayle, United’s senior vice president of network planning and global alliances, framed the Japanese expansion around choice rather than volume: “Whether customers are dreaming of skiing in Sapporo, planning a business trip to Tokyo with some exploration added in, or an even bigger adventure across Asia, United gives travelers more ways to get there than any U.S. airline.”

Sources