ljwobker

Anyone know if there's a trick to figuring out pricing and routing when you want to book in PP, but not all the flights in your trip are PP-enabled?

For example, RDU-SFO-SYD would have PP on the overwater leg but not on the RDU-SFO leg. I can't feed the fare codes O/A/R into Matrix, because they aren't available at all on the domestic legs. And, of course, checking just the fares for the overwater segments gets the pricing all wrong.

VWang1111

The domestic segments book in to the B fare code. Maybe search matrix with O/A/R/B and that might work?

findark

f bc=r|bc=a|bc=o

works just fine for me. Only requires one matching segment.

docbert

Search Matrix for the PP fare codes (f bc=r|bc=a|bc=o) and it'll find you the through-fares in those codes. Any segments where PP isn't available will book into B.

The reason this works is that you're looking for a FARE code that starts with one of those letters, not necessarily a booking code on each leg (to use Matrix's use of those terms). The fare code for the entire trip will be Rxxxxxx, which covers the booking codes of R and B on the individual legs.

For some routes it may also be worth searching for the 2 segments separately (but on the same ticket) as it could be cheaper to book the first leg in economy and the second in PP - although as per usual United makes this difficult with various combinability rules...

Given you're looking at SFO-SYD, you'll need to be looking on/after December 3rd, as that's when PP starts on that route.

jsloan

No, the reason that it works is that the prime booking code for the fare is, e.g., R, The fare code actually won’t start with R in most cases — in fact, most P+ flights are sold on a differential basis from an economy fare, like domestic First, so it’s more common to see the fares start with an Economy code (e.g., K, S, or T).

You could do this on Matrix with multi-city search, but I agree that the results aren’t likely to be pretty.

I suspect it might be seasonal as well? So there may be an end date for P+ service, at least until they retrofit some 787s.

ljwobker

Thanks to all - I had valid dates but was looking for R on a flight that does have P+ but didn't have any R availability... so I was in fact doing it wrong but for a different wrong reason. Searching for 'A' does show me flights where that's available, and the domestic legs do indeed show up as B fares. Is it safe to assume that these domestic B fares/segments will allow automatic upgrades for 1Ks ?

findark

Yes, assuming the flight is CPU eligible and has PN space.