Originally Posted by
joelax
I have made this exact trip before for $2,300 in business (though I don't remember how far in advance I booked it). That aside, my point is that those are the prices you get even if you're trying to book an economy ticket on UA.com. I'm juxtaposing the fact that the cheapest price in the "Business" column for the non-stop outbound flight is ~$1,600, but the cheapest ticket in the "Economy" column on return flight is ~$4,000. That's just not normal in my experience. But perhaps that's the result of UA wanting to charge at least $4,000 for that itinerary (whether in economy or otherwise), as others have pointed out.
Right, so the idea is that the booking engine determines that the cheapest way to fly in Business from EWR to TXL when routing the nonstop outbound is to fly EWR-TXL-FRA-EWR. This is actually done with
ZX7RC0E EWR to FRA, which allows a free stopover in TXL. The outbound fare component is about $3,000 including taxes and YQ. The UA website takes roughly half of this and shows it as the price from EWR to TXL (as this is "half the journey"). The "return" is now TXL-FRA, the other half of your outbound fare, plus the second fare component FRA-EWR (which is another almost $3,000). The website combines the second half of EWR-FRA with the full FRA-EWR and shows you the ~$4,300.
If you do
anything else on your return segment, it invalidates the outbound. Instead it needs to use
D6RC0E, the cheapest actual fare to TXL, which is about $4,345 on a half-round-trip basis. So it would show your other choice as adding ($4,345 - $1,600 [what you already selected] + any actual return fare component).
It's a bit screwy, but what price
should it show for EWR-TXL?