Originally Posted by
Howard
The ticket is a future domestic round trip AAA-CCC with a connection at BBB in both directions. However, AAA-CCC and CCC-AAA are both priced as one way fares. The buyup was for CCC-BBB-AAA. P was available on the married segment CCC-BBB-AAA. While the agent said that P wasn't available on the isolated segment CCC-BBB, when I asked her to try it as a married segment, she said she couldn't get P to appear that way either. Again, on united.com, CCC-BBB-AAA was available for a new ticket in P class for both segments.
It is
possible that the one-way AAA-CCC fare was not combinable with the one-way CCC-AAA P fare. However, I’d rate the chances of that as extremely low. The best way to get an idea of what the upgrade “should” cost would be to price a new AAA-CCC-AAA RT selecting the same prices. Having said that, if you’re not changing the outbound, it may not need to be repriced; the fare rules are inconsistent on that point. (I’ve seen both). My guess is that it was typical UA IT screwiness.
Anyway, it’s little help now, but if you expect to make changes on a flight, one-way tickets are always the simplest, and two one-ways are often (not always) the same cost as the round-trip domestically. (Of course, you would end up paying two change/cancel fees if that need arose, so it’s not like there’s no downside).