Hoping that someone can explain this to me:

I was trying to book a flight this morning on .bomb for a flight from Oslo to the US. I live in the UK and have a UK credit card.

The search engine defaults to a Billing Country of United States, and I've not had need to change this before now. I'm happy with the results being in dollars, and usually go ahead and book using the CC which is stored in my mp account.

Having found the fare I was looking for, I tried to book it, only for it to fail on the payment screen. The search engine took me back to available flights with the results in UK Pounds Stirling. However, the prices and availability were VERY different. The range of UA only itineraries had been reduced to one, and that was a W fare base, not L that was available previously.

After phoning in to make the booking, I started to dig a little, and found that there was indeed a discrepancy based solely on what the billing country was. I simplified the search to just OSL - EWR, outward on September 24th and returning October 2nd. I left the billing country as United States, and got back a L fare of $677.

I then hit the back button, changed ONLY the billing country to United Kingdom, and searched again. This time I got back availability only in W as the lowest fare bucket at a cost of £528 (equivalent of $871 approx).

The lack of any space in the S/T/L buckets results in a nearly $200 difference in the fare offered, for exactly the same flights, just because of the different billing country.

I did follow through to select the same return flight in both cases. The return was offered in K both times, but the flight cost did not alter from either $677 for a US booking, or £528 for the UK address.

The fare only works from Scandanavia to the US, not in return, but as I'm travelling to Norway to take the flight, having a UK address should not exclude me from taking advantage of the cheaper fare.

Incidently, the 1k desk had no issues in booking it at the US rate, but in £ stirling on the UK credit card.

Can anyone come up with a logical explanation for the limited availability on the outward when the billing country changed? I can email screen dumps of the search results if anyone wants to investigate further.