djb61

I have a current itinerary for April 30th of FCO->LHR->HKG->CTU returning on May 13th. Flights are BA549(J)->BA31(I but UUa to Z)->KA824(I) on the outbound and KA821(I)->BA32(I)->BA552(I) on the inbound, selling classes are in brackets.

I am in the unfortunate position of having to change this as my other halfs passport is stuck at UK visa processing in Warsaw and they are showing no sign of giving it back in time.

I was looking at changing this to be outbound May 28th returning June 10th. As this is predeparture I know in addition to the change free (300 euros each) I would pay the fare difference. At first this looked ok, the only availability change I could see in expert flyer was BA31 would have to go I->R and would add around £200 each.
Trying to price the new itinerary on ITA however I am seeing something I didn't expect, I can only get the price I expect if I connect out FCO->LHR on BA551. If I try to have the FCO->LHR leg on any later flights the fare almost doubles. Looking at this it is causing the BA31 leg to price into C bucket instead of R. Can anyone tell me why I am seeing this? Or am I better off just calling up and seeing what they quote for a change.

obduro

Call up. Matrix won't accurately be able to predict the difference, and it can go a bit wonky when you get overly specific with fare buckets.

If you have access to Expert Flyer, you can get quite an accurate picture of the fare difference.

Globaliser

I can't reproduce it exactly because I'm not sure whether you're looking at exactly the same flights on the new travel dates.

But I can see that if you connect to KA824 on the same day as arriving in HKG, the fare is much higher and books into C class. That is because KA824 on 29 May looks like it's very heavily booked.

That doesn't itself explain why you're only seeing the higher fare if you book on any FCO-LHR flight other than the first flight. It may be that there are other subtle changes in the itineraries that you're not seeing, because what I can see (looking at the time bars) is the same price for all valid FCO-LHR departures connecting to the same LHR-HKG and HKG-CTU flights.

However, all of this is complicated by the fact that there may be different availability depending on whether you're looking at UK market or IT market availability (and ITA is not reliable in its choice).

In addition, CX uses married sector logic - so if you're looking at flights in isolation you may not get the true picture. If you query BA31 --> KA824, you will get one set of availability numbers for KA824, but if you query CX252 --> KA824, you may get a completely different set of availability numbers for KA824. Thus I class may be unavailable on KA824 if you're connecting from BA, but available if you're connecting from CX.

Moreover, there may be different availability numbers for KA824 and for the CX codeshare on the same aircraft.

BTW, I expect your LHR-FCO sector at the end should be in J class, not I.

djb61

Thanks for that information. Yes I am trying to just shift the dates but keep exactly the same flight numbers, the final LHR->FCO should indeed be in J, that was a typo.

If I try and price this as a new fare on ba.com it does now book the KA824/CX5824 in to economy if I select for 2 adults. Looking on expertflyer it seemed this flight had I2 availability but checking connecting availability it seems this only has I1 when connecting from BA.
I'm going to give BA a call and see what it prices up as, thanks for the information everyone.

djb61

An update to close this thread off.

When asking BA to quote for a change to May 28th on the outbound with the same flight numbers it did indeed want to book into C due to availability on the KA824 connection. They came back with a fare difference of about £3k (I didn't even inquire if that was per person or not), as the original tickets were only 1100 euros each I wasn't prepared to pay that.

I had investigated other options and what I ended up with on the outbound was moving the FCO->LHR->HKG segments to May 27th with an overnight in HKG on May 28th connecting to KA820 HKG->CTU on the morning of May 29th instead. The outbound LHR->HKG still went I->R but the overnight in HKG being <24 hours didn't add anything.
I also switched from BA31 to BA27 on the outbound as there was first award availability on BA27 on May 27th but not for BA31.
Total cost including change fees, fare difference and tax recalc was about 600 euros per person. Much more reasonable and we managed to keep our first on the outbound, albeit on the 777 instead of the 380.

Thanks again everyone for your knowledge, it made resolving this far less painful.

Globaliser

Glad that you got an acceptable solution to the problem!