More fun for UA PremPlus TATL / LH intra-european

Appears, to combine LH economy with a UA TATL in PremPlus, you presently need a specific fare class on the intra-europe flights to construct a fare
O needs Y
A needs M
R needs Q

even if a lower (or higher?) fare class are available on LH

The trial and tribulation

Used multi-city, found an "acceptable" itin R out, A on the return, prices, so go to checkout and will not take first credit card , tried again, no luck, tried a second card, fail again. UA is reporting the card is being declined. Get a email from bank, card declined due to security code error?

Called UA , initial agent can only see A out and A return , $600 higher. Walk them thru multi-city, no joy on price. Then the agent offers to try another system, the "website" with multi-city and gets the desired price. Try both credit cards -- same failure. Cannot farelock due to LH legs. Concerned either the credit cards will lock up or inventory will disappear.

First agent gave up, suggested I call the banks to see what the issue is.

Called bank(s), neither see a problem and neither have locked their card.

Call UA back and get what eventually would a "great" agent who was unwillingly to give-up on a MMer / Plat.

After about an hour and consulting multi-support folks, determined that LH flight connecting to the UA R did not have Q available (even though Expert Mode showed Q9 (Y9 B9 M9 U9 H9 X0 Q9 V0 W0 S0 T0 L0 K0) (odd placement of X)
and multi-city selected Q fare. Note this was a native LH, not a codeshare
On ExpertFlyer for the LH flight showed a very different Y9 B9 M9 U9 H9 Q0 V9 W0 S0 T0 L0 K0 -- no Q but the lower V is V9
Note this behavior Q0 V9 shows up for other flights on this route

So at this point, I expected the agent to say sorry, but that was not this agent's style.
Over the next two hours, the agent worked with others to honor the fare but forcing the LH fare class to work -- apparent a higher fare would not work, it had to be Q. Then forcing the UA to an A fare and using M for LH. That sort of worked but the agent / supervisor(s) (which agreed to honor the fare) still no joy using the cards. I was watching along my account and the agent kept saying -- hang on, we will make this work. I could see an PNR appear in my account (Not Ticketed) and first priced in dollars and then in NUC (neutral unit of construction) which I have never seen online. Finally the agent say, we need to do some more things, don't worry, a supervisor will call you back today to ticket this.

Now , the supervisor never did call back, the itin was still in the account and I had 3 days to ticket. Tried paying online. Called and got an agent that did not want to hear the history and said I was doing this all wrong. The issue was LH had not confirmed the booking previously but had now. Then got a lecture, that I should have had them build the ticket inside of a credit I had. Anyways I eventually got ticketed as R-M-M-A (perhaps the delayed confirmation was getting LH to accept M instead of Q- requiring manual confirmation)

It was an interesting day on the phone and now I have no idea if I will be able to change this ticket if R become available on the return. The non-ticketable outbound is still showing on UA.



TL;DR
- UA PremPlus requires specific LH economy fares to work for a connecting
- Something wired where UA's expert mode and flight search has "wrong" inventory for LH
- ExpertFlyer reporting LH's inventory weird behavior of a higher economy fare class is zero'ed out while a lower fare class has inventory
- The degree to which a good agent will make something work, eventually
- Mutli-city ticketing is useful but buggy