Quail

A trip I have booked now has new P availability on a key flight that results in a significantly lower price than originally booked. I want to take advantage of that but I don't want to forfeit the fare difference.

Fare rules allow side trips, I can pull them up on matrix, and the matrix powertools links produce bookable itineraries.
My plan was to preserve some of that otherwise forfeited difference by booking a domestic J side trip with an overnight. However, when calling to change I've been told by two agents that international trips must be point to point (effectively: side trips are not allowed for international tickets). They only agreed to price things out when dropping those segments.

Is there some magic way to get AC agents to just take flight numbers and see how it prices out? Or does this actually violate some unwritten (in the fare rules) rule?

Not sure if there is an existing thread where this belongs.

jjclancy

Suggestions:

• can you just rebook online via change flights?
• stop calling it a side trip. "I have a straightforward multi-city booking to do. Two legs of it are as already booked. We're changing that to add <these_things>, in <this_order>."

Quail

Changing online: I wish, but it doesn't allow it. Thanks for the suggestion though, definitely worth trying that first.

I didn't mention any fancy terms, just dates and flights. They both balked as soon as I hit the same airport twice in my routing. At that point I said it seemed to work online on one ticket. First person said it's not possible to enter and the second person said I should book it separately with her on a different ticket (I asked if she could try it out to see what the price was and she said no and reaffirmed that it's against the rules and that bookings need to "make sense").

Hence my question here. I'm wondering if this is something frowned upon by AC or if I just need to try again another time to find an agent willing to price it out.

canadiancow

I'd book a new ticket, call in, and say you want to change the first one to match the second one, then cancel the second one.

Put it in front of them so they have something "valid" to look at.

Quail

I think I will try this thanks. When I first made the post availability was P1 so I would have been afraid to do this, but now it is P2.

Smiley90

in the same direction of travel, e.g. outbound/inbound like YYZ-LHR-ZRH-LHR-AUH? Because that's indeed not allowed, at least not for award travel.

canadiancow

Good thing this isn't award travel?

Smiley90

Aaaah then ignore my post. Somehow I interpreted it like that.

kalderlake

I did the same thing, and spent a few minutes trying to translate the OP into Aeroplan-speak.

I think it might be the word "Complex" in the title throwing us off-track.

Smiley90

And because "trying to hit the same airport twice" was an error, which is a very common error people make when trying to book "side-trips" or "multi-city" trips as the first response suggested calling it... a perfect storm of being misled!

ACflyerDE

To the OP‘s credit, he did say in the very first sentence that he was looking at booking class P and not I. But the reference to a „side-trip“ confused me just as well…

IluvSQ

Yes, I never understand the reluctance of some posters to spell out exactly what they have, and what they want - with
specific cities mentioned. That makes it so much easier to understand and assist.

Quail

I'm getting confused now. Isn't side trip what it's called, and what the fare rules calls it?
I see how complex makes it look like the Aeroplan thread (indeed I was looking for a revenue equivalent of that thread to post in)

You're right. In my case I'm being (overly) cautious about being identified by AC because of some previous posts. The double EQx promo changed me from not expecting to fly AC at all to expecting SE soon.