zrs70

I had a $3600 RT P fare for travel later this month. When playing around online today, I saw that if I choose the outbound in P and the return in Y, the fare would drop $1000. But I looked closely at the results, and saw that the return was P from EZE to IAH and Y (code Y) IAH to LAX.

I paid a $300 fee and got a $900 voucher. If that last leg doesn't clear, I'm not too worried. But a 1K on a Y fare should put me in fairly high ranking.

PsiFighter37

Good luck!

WineCountryUA

Look out for Instant Upgrade into PN.

cfischer

that is very weird. I have seen small differences, but $1k

exerda

I had a similar experience on a r/t to POS last year.

It took the .bomb support staff a bit of work to get the ticket reissued, as .bomb kept, well, bombing out after offering up the price. They ended up charging me only a "service fee" and not the full change fee in the end, too, given it took them so long to get it to refare to POS-IAH in P and IAH-IAD in some kind of Y fare (and there was immediately-confirmable space for the upgrade on IAH-IAD to boot).

transportprof

This thread raises a broader question for me.

How much time do FT sages spend searching for lower fares after they have purchased tickets on United?

I do not usually do this, and I now beginning to wonder whether I've been leaving large piles of cash on the table?

exerda

It depends. If you paid a really pricey bit for a ticket, you might check on occasion to see if they've opened up a discount bucket that makes it worthwhile with the change fee.

I have very rarely done that.

On the other hand, I have had occasions where I went in to try refaring a ticket for a slight date change, a flight change, or to get a discount C ticket when I'd booked Y and my GPU doesn't look like it will clear, and have run into weird edge cases where refaring to end-on-end with a fare break, with paid C on part of the trip and Y on the rest, comes out cheaper or only marginally more even with the change fee factored in.

findark

Almost never, but I'm also aware of what price movements are possible, and I usually don't book if significant downward movement is at all likely.

DELee

Up front, I've done this for more expensive trips but it soon becomes a "when do I pull the trigger" game versus "there's something cheaper but the fare difference isn't huge and I've got work to do".

If you had the time and were willing to spot these swings in fare differences, probably. However, I suspect that you have more important/interesting things to do instead. That being said, yes, you might save some money but usually the better/best seats are going/gone as you go through these processes.

I guess it depends on how you value your time versus potential savings by tracking/re-tracking existing ticket segments and trips.

Back on topic, it looks like zrs70 kept an eye on the trip and saw a beneficial reprice for this travel. For the majority of us who have 10s or even 100s of segments and trips each year, this could become a full time job.

David

stevenshev

If I were a betting man, which I am, I would say you have an -UP fare where the underlying Y fare bucket is required on that leg and isn't available, but allows you to book Y instead.

docbert

Welcome to the way that airline fares work. With prices being point-to-point, and especially with UA not allowing end-on-end fares for a lot of their routes not (even in BusinessFirst), changing the routings or doing Y for short segments can make a significant difference to the fares.

Not a UA example, but I'm about to fly IST-SFO with TK. Just flying that one leg, the price was ~$4,500. But adding in a LHR-IST leg a few days ago, the price dropped to $2,000 - so I'm getting more flying for less than half the price, which is the opposite situation as yours but shows the type of situations that point-to-point fares can cause.

In your case I'm a little surprised that you couldn't have booked it as two fares but both in F - IAH-LAX in F is currently going for as low as $240 (a K fare that books into First! Seriously!), but even if you'd had to pay a higher fare class it should have been well less than $1000...