How to handle fare combinability?
 

Hi,

Apologies if this is in the wrong board; please move if there's a more appropriate place :)

I couldn't find much information about how combinability rules are supposed to be evaluated on fares. I was looking at a SEA-CHQ flight, which came up on ITA as:

SEA-FRA - Fri, Jul 25 (UA 8718)
FRA-SKG - Sat, Jul 26 (LH 5928)
SKG-CHQ - Sat, Jul 26 (A3 728)

CHQ-ATH - Sun, Aug 3 (A3 345)
ATH-FRA - Mon, Aug 4 (LH 1285)
FRA-SEA - Mon, Aug 4 (UA 8717)

ITA splits it up into two fares:
Fare 1: Carrier UA YR1 SEA to ATH
Fare 2: Carrier UA SHX21NCE ATH to SEA

The YR1 fare seems pretty unrestrictive, so I'm not really concerned about that one. However, the SHX21NCE fare does have a number of restrictions, including combinability:

ROUND TRIPS/CIRCLE TRIPS
FARES MAY BE COMBINED ON A HALF ROUND TRIP BASIS
-TO FORM ROUND TRIPS
-TO FORM CIRCLE TRIPS
A MAXIMUM OF TWO INTERNATIONAL FARE COMPONENTS
PERMITTED.
PROVIDED -
COMBINATIONS ARE WITH ANY FARE FOR CARRIER UA/LH/LX/OS/
SN/AC PUBLISHED FOR TRAVEL VIA THE ATLANTIC.
COMBINATIONS ARE WITH ANY FARE FOR CARRIER UA/NH
PUBLISHED FOR TRAVEL VIA THE PACIFIC.

Does this mean when evaluating the RT combinability, we only reference the transatlatantic fare, which is on UA/LH? If so, is the A3 fare from SKG-ATH ever supposed to be evaluated in any combinability setting? Or is it considered an add-on, since the fares are just SEA-ATH, not SEA-CHQ?

Thanks,
Roger

Welcome to FT!

You do not actually have any A3 Fares -- you have 2 UA Fares (SEA-ATH + ATH-SEA) combined on a Half R/T basis, with a Stopover in CHQ.

Wow, very interesting--thanks KVS! If I were given the list of fares as:

SEA-FRA, YR1
FRA-SKG, YR1
SKG-CHQ, YR1
CHQ-ATH, YR1
ATH-FRA, SHX21NCE
FRA-SEA, SHX21NCE

How am I supposed to tell that I had the SEA-ATH fare with a stopover? Can I safely assume that you can "collapse" all the fares with the same code?

Thanks!

Make up your mind please.


However, to answer your original question, the two fares are combined on a half-round-trip-basis as the first fare most likely allows stopovers and also allows a routing thru CHQ while having the destination ATH.

Normally, if it prices on ITA Matrix, don't worry about the fare rules. It's when routes doesn't price you need to worry about the rules.

Agehall--thanks for the reply. The list of fares in my 2nd message was from Sabre, so I'm just trying to figure out how the fares are logically bundled.