FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Commuting weekly by air -- best options to save but avoid change fees/breakage.
Old Apr 21, 2017, 11:20 am
  #8  
jsloan
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Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: Austin, TX
Posts: 21,186
Originally Posted by tods27
I think that the perception of everything being priced one-way comes from the way that UA.com shows the pricing on each leg. I was looking at flights to HI for November and when I looked at doing one-way with miles and one-way paid, the one-way paid was more than a round trip flight.
It really is market-based. Hawaii has long been an outlier in terms of travel patterns.

SFO-SEA is currently priced on a one-way basis. The best fares are currently available with a 21-day advance purchase. However, SFO-SEA is a pretty big business route and if you're flying Monday morning to Friday evening, you're likely to run into inventory issues -- UA may choose not to open up the deep discount buckets on those flights.

You may do better flying "against traffic," so to speak; if you're based in the Bay Area, consider flying DL because they're more likely to have traffic originating from SEA on Monday morning than from SFO. (I'd say the same thing about AS, but the VX merger complicates things). This is pure speculation, though, and you should probably keep an eye on fares for a while before choosing a path. :-)
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