Originally Posted by
SFO voyageur
So I often fly transatlantic in business in order to sleep and return in PE when it's a day time flight. I just attempted to buy a new ticket doing this and the outbound business fare was around $4200 based on RT, but when I tried to book the return the PE fare was an astounding $12,000 to complete the RT and even regular economy fare was the same as returning in business, around $4200. Obviously, AA wants you to buy the complete business RT in this case. I hadn't encountered this before and wondered if it's common.
Since the AA schedules and the BA connections were not that great anyway, I finally gave up on AA and booked the flight the way I wanted at a reasonable price with UA.
I don't think AA is actively discouraging anything, I do this type of thing frequently too, it all depends on the exact fares and fare rules and cities as to what you can combine what with.
Just last week I booked a roundtrip from Europe with outbound economy, return business, everything priced normally.
In your case it could be the $4200 business fare requires a roundtrip booking, so selecting PE or economy for the return segment causes it to reprice to something like a one-way business fare on the outbound and a one-way PE/economy fare on the return.
Or it could just be aa.com behaving wonky and if you tried it again in a few days it would price normally. This happens from time to time too.