I'm pretty sure this has been discussed before, but I can't find the thread. Sorry. (I looked -- I really did.) But I didn't understand the answer then, so I'm hoping someone can help me now.

I was looking last week at a flight from YYT to PHL via YYZ. My TA was looking at a Tango fare, and I was trying to help her find a Tango+ fare. (That's a post for another time, perhaps.)

I was looking at a Tango+ fare on the AC web site that I found by entering YYT to PHL. She was looking at just the YYT to YYZ portion and said there was no Tango+ fare showing. We went back and forth this way for a while, her saying it was not there, me saying it was. Then I checking the availability just for YYT to YYZ on the web site. Now I saw the same as her: no Tango+ fare showing.

I thought maybe it had gone while I was looking, so I searched again with YYT to PHL, and the Tango+ fare was back, for the exact same flight. I explained my results to the TA, and somehow that gave her what she needed to book it. So I got what I wanted.

But I'm totally confused. How can one flight be available at a certain fare class for one itinerary, and not for another? I thought AC did away with all (or at least most) of these shenanigans when they went to the one-way segment pricing model. Does anyone know what's going on here?

I have found on transborder flights, that the Tango+ fare is actually $1 LESS than the Tango fare!
Maybe YYT-YYZ has no T+ fares at all.

This type of availability has a name that I have trouble remembering, but it is something like 'short-haul-stop-sale'. It has been going on for years and the only thing that surprised me was that I didn't think that Res3 was capable in doing this when it first arrived at AC. Basically the system is set up to allow people to buy through tickets on segments that are closed for short-hauls traffic as the flights that is blocked YYT-YYZ is probably the only one that connects to PHL.

There is another industry term called 'Bid-Price' which means that the revenue management system adjusts to get the highest price possible for a commodity that may be in short supply. In your case the fare that you are willing to pay for YYT-PHL is higher than what someone else is offering for just YYT-YYZ. Thus the system is willing to sell you the seat at that price versus the lower amount for the first sector only. If someone wants to purchase just YYT-YYZ on that flight then they have to trump the YYT-PHL fare by paying a Latitude fare. AC have had this in place for some years.

I was surprised to see this effect also in terms of I class on multi-segment bookings. In many examples there was I class available for AAA-BBB-CCC but in looking just at AAA-BBB and then BBB-CCC individually, there was no I class available.

Sounds like the so-called Segment Marriage Logic (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showt...80#post2804880) ...

According to other threads I've read, AC has set the Tango fares on transborder routes to $1 more than the Tango+ fares so that the Tango+ fare will be picked up by the travel search web sites and by TAs. Apparently AC recognizes that the Tango product is not competitive with the US carriers on those routes and wishes to compete based on the Tango+ fare class instead. I don't quite understand why they can't remove the Tango fare class from these routes altogether, but apparently they can't.

Oh, and I meant to add, I know there are T+ fares on YYT to YYZ because I buy them constantly.

Thanks for the reply. That makes a lot more sense to me, although it still doesn't really seem fair.

But what is Res3?

Segment Marriage Logic... now why didn't I think to search for that?

"RES III" is the name of AC's computer reservation system.

Just another example of the incompetence of their IT people?

Apparently upper management takes s*h*i*t from them and accepts answers like "we can't do this" rather than just telling them "do it" and fire them if they don't. (Or something along these lines. Anyway, it would seem upper management must be computer-illiterate enough to swallow any BS that their IT folks feed them. And in the end, never engage in whatever drastic decision may be needed to fix the mess.)

Don't listen to the naysayers on topics like this. It is not an IT issue, but it is a Marketing issue. Many people are programmed to go and look for Tango fares and they need to be offered.

It would be very simple to zero out allocations for Tango so that they are not offered at all.

Your experience of seeing T+ higher than Tango only occurs in those markets where where Tango sells out very quickly. All of the fare categories have multiple fare levels within them and there is some overlap between T, T+, and even Latitude.

I always kinda wondered about that.

Now, since you seem to know a lot about this, I'm pretty sure I've seen it happen that T+ was sold out on a certain route while T was still available.

When seats are allocated into fare buckets, is it a fixed allocation that's done ahead of time, and then maybe adjusted manually later, or is the system always adjusting the allocation? It seems to me that if there's a T fare available, and I want to buy a T+, it would make more sense to convert the T seat to a T+ seat and let me buy it. In other words, when the number of seats allocated to T+ is sold, allow customers to buy T+ seats from the T inventory, rather than showing T+ as sold out. Or is the theory that customers looking for T+ will go up to L rather than back to T?

It just seemed strange to me that the higher fare classes could sell out before the lower ones.

Thanks, BTW, for all the good info so far. Much appreciated.

In theory this should not happen as the fare classes should disappear from the bottom going up as the flight fills. It depends upon the number of seats sold by either cabin (J and Y) and the 'velocity' at which the fare classes are filling.

What has thrown a wrench into this in the past ( about a year ago) is that Montie vowed that AC would offer the lowest fare on any city pair as compared to WestJet. This resulted in some strange things happening on select flights and select days.

A simple FT search with the keyword "transborder" yields many returns on the first results page, some pertaining to the partial topic above of transborder Tango+<Tango, which has been described ad nauseum in this forum:

The below is just one example of many:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=377289

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=410013

There is no secret as to why this is the case. It has been explicitly stated by the likes of Andrew Yiu/Empress and Ben Smith (either here or at an AC DO, where the details of each DO can be found here as well).