Originally Posted by
branston
I always forget to check that before purchase and I don't see any way to pull up the fare (or FF earnings) after it's booked. I let my EF subscription lapse when I wasn't flying last year, but it might be time to renew.
I was able to purchase the fare and it did get ticketed at the lower price. I know GF does sometimes price fares as separate tickets which may be the case here. I'm just surprise that the AA website allowed it and didn't reprice it at the higher fare.
No, it's not separate tickets/fares. It is a single fare (fare basis code
GNX8AQI1) covering the entire route and thus married segment inventory should be used. In the instance above, ExpertFlyer is showing there is zero inventory in the I bucket for married segments. There is I inventory on the standalone flights, but that is only to be used when buying an individual fare on the individual flights. It looks like Google Flights is quoting the single fare based on individual flight inventory instead of married segment inventory which is not what it is supposed to be doing. There are multi-city tricks to get Google Flights/ITA to quote wrong fares using individual bucket inventory, but I haven't seen it happen on one-way searches before (and it seems only Google Flights is doing it). When using the multi-city tricks on Google/ITA to bring up fares for which there is no married inventory on delta.com, it will reject it when you checkout as it will validate married inventory availability before purchase. It appears that aa.com may not do this final validation step.