Originally Posted by
skidooman
Here is something I found really insane, even if it is the opposite situation.
Just booked a ticket on united.com in J. BOS->PVG, then TYO->BOS.
Two low fares available, about $1,500 with United and Air China (via PEK), with TPAC on UA. Choose this fare, and return flight in J priced at $721!
Need Y instead on that itinerary? I saw $3K to PEK. And $1,500 out of TYO.
Now, I wanted to be smart and avoid PEK. I was willing to pay more ($1,800) to fly direct to PVG. But then, somehow, the $721 out of TYO disappeared. So, went back and booked through PEK (with 4 hours to transfer it should be OK).
The mysteries of ticket pricing are wonderous. I was willing to spend $300 more but United somehow preferred me to spend less.
Anyway, the finance folks at my company will be very happy.
So, what actually happened here is that you didn't buy a flight to PVG at all. Instead, you purchased a roundtrip ticket to PEK, with a stopover in PVG and an embedded surface segment from PVG to TYO. UA currently has a sale fare filed -- $2156 all-in roundtrip from BOS to PEK in P, plus $100 for a stopover. United's pricing engine will sometimes find fares like this. When it does, the per-leg fare calculations are messed up. The $1500 comes from the entire outbound to PEK ($1078) plus a fraction of the return fare (looks like about $500, but it's basically completely arbitrary). The $721 isn't the price of any TPAC leg; it's just the residual piece of the return flight.
That's why you can't book the PVG nonstop on the outbound and avoid PEK -- they haven't filed a sale fare to PVG. It's also why you would have to pay much more for Y; as soon as you flew Y in either direction, you'd need a J ticket to PVG instead of PEK, which bumped up the price.
That's a great price for that route, though. ^