Originally Posted by
sfo3388
Hi,
I had two situations with booking partner flights via United.com or app. Hope FT experts can share some insights:
I am having hard time booking NH flight from HND to SFO (direct or via LAX) on Premium Economy. For HND-SFO or HND-LAX-SFO, Untied assigned A class on NH and gave me the price. After I clicked "Buy Now", I got error message to call United. Web Support agent told me that she couldn't plate the flight to A class even she saw the A-class inventory. She said NH did not release the seat at lower price during the time of purchase. There is nothing UA can do.
HUCA.
Originally Posted by
sfo3388
From the screenshot from EF below, I can see the PE inventory of NH108/UA7939 is not matching (E0 vs A2), although the highest PE matches (G5 vs O5). Is this the reason why I couldn't purchase an A seat of UA7939?
Codeshare inventory is managed separately from inventory of the underlying flight.
Originally Posted by
sfo3388
Separately, I was booking FRA-SFO, also on PE. One segment was AC-operated FRA-YVR. After the ticket was issued, I saw a note "you are on waitlist" under this segment.
That could easily just be UA IT getting confused. How’d ones it look on the AC site?
Originally Posted by
sfo3388
So it does not matter if the ticket is issued or not, with a United codeshare flight number and inventory, it is up to the partners to approve the purchase? And is it common that inventory does not agree for several days?
In most cases, it is not necessary to validate codeshare inventory with the operating airline That’s the point of codesharing — UA can manage the inventory differently than NH. This happens
all the time and is not suspicious. (It’s common to see flight costs differ by thousands of dollars depending upon whether you use the native code or the codeshare, and there’s no particular restriction as to which will be more or less expensive.
Originally Posted by
D582
It's UA's problem for not properly managing their codeshare inventory. There are per-flight mappings of how many seats in UA inventory are sellable in OAL inventory, and UA still needs to request the space from OAL.
Yes, UA has to send through the ticketing request to the operating airline, but that airline doesn’t need sellable inventory in that fare class. (In theory, they wouldn’t even need sellable inventory in that cabin, although in practice I suspect
that might actually fail). The latter is why normal rules for IRROPS are to use native codes — because you generally can’t put someone onto another airline if that flight is in an oversold situation, and the native inventory governs for that.