What is the Rate Desk? What do they do?
 

I'm trying to change a CO ticket for tomorrow. On UA, any time I needed to change a ticket the phone agent would do it for me. Right now, the phone agent keeps putting me on hold and apologizing that is taking her so long to get through to the "Rate Desk." It's been about 20 min so far.

The Rate Desk has to get involved when the change is "too complicated" for SHARES to figure out. Back in the day, my America West agents used to spend a lot of time on the phone with their "Rate Desk" as well. Generally, a complicated ticket change or if some incompetent agent screws up your ticket causes a call to the "Rate Desk".

For example, it is possible that the agent tried to change your ticket, entered wrong commands which messed up the ticket, and thereby had to call the "Rate Desk".

So this is something we should get used to with the switch to SHARES?

The dAArkside has a pretty good explanation of what the Rate Desk does on their site. In short they're the team that figures out what your ticket will cost.

I don't know what impact the systemwide transition to SHARES will have on calls to the rate desk; the agents helping me are usually calling the helpdesk instead.

Probably not.

Do you have a non CO/UA segment in the booking?

This usually happens with interline tickets.

Rate desks can be an great advantage if you'd building a complex international routing with multiple carriers. I've been able to drive the fares down significantly if they have the rate desk price it versus the RES system.

Sigh. Not everything is Shares or "$misek"-related.

It is possible your original fare class is not available, or the fare had changed, etc, and thus needed something to be overridden....

And for the record, Continental's reservations agents do not use SHARES.

I had the rate desk involved on a ticket re-issue from 005 to 016. Multi carrier already upgraded itinerary with through fares. I asked how much to upgrade a Copa segment from a G fare to one that earned miles (it was a CO through segment). Rate desk checked, and instead of giving me a price just told me it would be much cheaper to buy with Elite Maximizer if I wanted the PQM's.