Originally Posted by
fuyao
Yes and no.
If a TA books the regular published fare, you get the same exact rules as booking directly with UA.
But most TAs book NEGO / unpublished fares to receive a few $ as earning and then the fares are more restrictive.
Ofc the TAs don't tell you that, otherwise the customer could always request to have a published fare booked.
Yes and no. The fare rules are the same but United restricts residual credit on all TA-issued tickets, even when they're issued with published fares. As a TA, I have no way of issuing a United ticket that allows me to provide any sort of flight credit for the residual value on an exchange of a nonrefundable fare (for US point of origin at least). (Note that this will probably change some as United implements NDC and TA tickets effectively get issued by United.) The way they do this is that all of United's nonrefundable fare rules have an ignore/forfeit residual value provision, and then United issued a waiver to itself to allow them to issue residual credit for directly-purchased tickets.
(fwiw, it's only really corporate TAs [with corporate contracts] and the largest OTAs and consolidators that sell fares with different rules than published fares. I do get access to some private fares, but the vast majority of them are just price differentials on a published fares and carry all of the same rules as the published fares.)