This is not a rant or a bashing at UA. I hope to gather more data points and bring this to light to UA in hope they will address this issue.

I am flying to LAX/BUR this November to attend a fundraiser event and I am not very flexible time-wise, I need to depart after 7pm on Thursday and be back in Pittsburgh around 11pm on Sunday night. As always, for all of my leisure travels, I checked ITA for PIT-LAX/BUR-PIT, ITA gave me a price of $452 for a slightly obscure routing that works for me time-wise [BUR-SFO-PIT does not work because it arrives at midnight, same with DEN which arrives at 12:35am] and the routing was BUR-SFO-IAH-PIT which arrives at 10:52pm while PIT-LAX is nonstop. Even though BUR-SFO-PIT is cheaper at $398.

I went to UA.com, selected Multi-City and put in PIT-LAX and BUR-PIT. UA.com only listed four choices for the return with two via SFO and the other two via DEN for $398-409]. I went back and modified the search criteria for the return and put in BUR-SFO, SFO-IAH, IAH-PIT manually, then UA.com priced it out at $507 in S fare, when T is indeed available [verified by doing a dummy one way booking for BUR-SFO-IAH-PIT]. I went all the way through the booking process to see if the price drops, but at the end it quoted me $507. Annoyed, I just turned off my computer and went to bed.

The following morning, I called my friend all ready to suck it up and pay $507, and verify the timing with him. I double checked on ITA and it still gave me the $452 price. Looked at EF to see if there were any new fares filed, but nada. Then I went back to UA.com and did the exact same thing I did the night before putting in each segment in manually. The initial price shown was $448 [because now UA.com is giving me T for the return], then I continued to select flights then it dropped to $402 where the return was now in K instead of T. I was close to paying a little over $100 more, when $402 was indeed available.

Lately [the last few months], I have been noticing that UA.com is having issues pricing out itineraries properly. It is also frustraing that UA.com is not showing ALL options for a given route that is within the discounted fare rules. This is more prevalent on routing that involves non-traditional connections, but I don't really have a choice since the timing of the SFO/DEN-PIT flights blow. CO.com always had issues giving options that were indeed available, but it always worked just fine when doing multi-city, but now the multi-city feature is buggy and not pricing trips correctly.

Anybody experiencing something similar?