Originally Posted by
PB53x11
Unrelated to the thread's primary issue, but: do you mean that for $244 you were able to change from a flex fare to business class, on a multi-segment trip including YYZ-SFO? How is it possible that it could be that cheap? Or am I mis-understanding what you've done?
There are lots of flights where I would be delighted to turn a flex fare into business class for $244 but I've always assumed the price differential would be far greater.
I'm replying to this here where it's more relevant.
My PNR was YOW-YYZ-YHZ-YQM-YHZ-YUL-YOW-YYZ-SFO, all on one day.
I bought it online, and forced it into lowest available flex. That meant G for YOW-YYZ-YHZ-YQM (one fare), and Q for YQM-YHZ-YUL-YOW-YYZ-SFO.
I didn't have much choice on the latter. It's the last day of my big EYW run, so I have to get home, and it was the YYZ-SFO that forced me into Q.
Well, today, I realized that there is no published G fare for YOW-YQM. There is, however, a published W, V, etc. fare. The result was a fare break. By just booking YOW-YYZ-YHZ-YQM in W, I would have saved almost $200.
But I couldn't get a refund at this point. I think I could have upfared all the way to Q without paying more (because that would bring it back to one fare from two). However, there was a P fare slightly more than that. So I figured I'd just pay the extra $17 and get the YOW-YYZ-YHZ into confirmed business, without require any upgrades.
But then I wondered if I'd made this mistake elsewhere. I had forced everything into G. Luckily, the YOW-YQM was the only one where there was no G fare published.
However, I decided to go through all my purchased fares and compare the P fare to the fare I purchased. YQM-SFO in P was around $220 CAD more than in Q. I'd easily pay $300 CAD to upgrade YYZ-SFO (my first LMU was $399 plus tax on this route). I'd certainly pay it to upgrade YHZ-YUL-YOW-YYZ-SFO. But more than that fare, I also upgraded the aforementioned YOW-YYZ-YHZ. All for a total of $244.
6 segments, over 12 hours of schedule flying time, probably over 15 hours sitting on the planes. That's about $15/hour. And now I'm confirmed J, so if I misconnect somewhere, I get rebooked into J. Not rebooked into Flex and put on an upgrade list.
If you're booking "simple" flights on AC.com, you won't make this mistake as long as you look at all columns in the fare grid. But when you're booking strange 8 segment PNRs, and "forcing" them into G (or whatever), you may miss cheap J fares, or worse, miss the fact that there is no G fare published, and as such, W would be cheaper (and higher upgrade priority
).