Originally Posted by
jonsail
"The connection points, 99.9%+ of the time, are irrelevant from a pricing perspective."
Are you sure? Sometimes when I try to use UA miles I find that the available award trip between A and B has multiple stops whereas the available cash price option is far more direct. Of course, this isn't always the case and sometimes there are great award options. But I have never found the reverse to be true.
Yes, I'm sure.
What you're seeing is a variant of fare class availability -- UA tends to restrict the fare class of discount award tickets in a way that makes the most convenient itineraries more convenient (more on that below). Sometimes you'll see, e.g., a one-stop itinerary be cheaper than a nonstop, or you might find it cheaper to fly through Denver than Houston. That is not because the specific connecting points matter -- it's because the inventory available differs between them. In nearly every case, if you found inventory space in the same bucket on each itinerary, you'd be able to select your preferred flight at the same price.
In a very small minority of cases, it's true that UA will price flights based upon one or more of the connection points -- this is called a broken fare, and UA's pricing engine will normally select it for you automatically when it's the lowest cost fare, and when it's allowed by the fare rules.
However, many fares, especially international fares, include a prohibition against "end-on-end" combinations, which is the type of combination being described (you'd be attaching the 'end' of an MGA-LAX fare to the 'end' of an LAX-LAS fare to make one journey). That's because the airline specifically doesn't want you to be able to do this: they want to be able to offer a discount in the LAX-LAS market (which is extremely competitive) and a discount in the LAX-MGA market (not sure how competitive that is, at least for non-stops, but bear with me), without offering a discount in the MGA-LAS market, which may not be as competitive.
Originally Posted by
WineCountryUA
That is due to award inventory availability.
Well, yes, but in the case of awards, there's an additional wrinkle. The award routing rules are much looser than the paid fare routing rules -- more flights can be combined together legally -- and they use the international stopover rule (24 hours) for domestic itineraries. UA is adept at zeroing out saver award space on connecting itineraries using married segment logic. Since UA doesn't publish married segment inventory for domestic itineraries with transfers longer than four hours -- as that would constitute a stopover on a cash fare -- you get the actual underlying inventory for those flights... and saver award space on non-stop flights, while not plentiful, can be found from time to time (speaking of economy, not first).
So, when you see UA trying to "force" you into a 5 hour stopover to get a discount award -- that's actually a mistake. They're trying not to offer it at all, but they're failing.
