Originally Posted by
spin88
It is an interesting case who is at fault. UA publishes the fares and allows them to be sold, but prohibits their sale outside the US. If a third party - which UA allows to sell tickets and takes your $$$ from - books you in N against UA's rules, I would think you have a good argument that given (a) no disclosure of fare rules, and (b) POS outside US that they have to give you regular Y.
Wild speculation here - no one is at fault at this point because there is no convincing evidence that the OP is actually booking an N fare.
For one thing, if Ctrip truly is using a foreign POS, it can't be an N fare. If UA doesn't publish the fare to the POS the agency is using, how would they even be able to use that fare? They can't just transpose a US-based POS fare to a Chinese one and apply it to an itinerary to sell. Which makes the whole situation of an 'argument' completely irrelevant - there won't be one. On another, OP is speculating since the RMB to US exchange is about equal to what UA is selling as BE. For one thing, it take real luck to the OP to have him match an exchange rate he got publicly with the one Ctrip is using. I haven't really tried for RMB, but have for a few other currencies and always find UAs rate is different then the going rate one finds on XE, etc. For another, it is very, very possible that the fare being offered to the OP is another POS-limited fare, but to the China (or other foreign) POS, that happens to be the same price as the BE fare in the US. That wouldn't be odd. Or a bulk fare, which has nothing to do with BE.
I realize OP is worried, but if they truly use a foreign POS, I wouldn't be. In that case, there are multiple other possibilities that are more likely then this being a BE fare.