Originally Posted by
ani90
Is this correct? I thought one of the disadvantages of having broken fares was that if there are delays or cancellations on the final leg(s) of the journey that you may still have to fly the first leg(s) or risk penalty?
Many / most people who have broken fares don't even realize it, as the system will sell them without any warning or any way for the non-expert passenger to know. I am 100% confident that the mere presence of a fare break does not, in and of itself, change anything about your recovery options.
Now, flying on
separate tickets is a totally different thing. If your flights are not ticketed together, then recovery will be YMMV. UA can help out but they're not obligated to. But a broken fare is just a pricing construct, and while it does technically add a new ticketed point, and an airline
could make the claim that they'd created a 45-minute "stopover" and therefore needed to fly to that city, I've never heard of that happening to anyone.
Basically, UA is not going out of their way to trap somebody with an arcane bait and switch.