Tricking Concur to show fare classes
 

I'm forced to use Concur for all my work-related travel bookings. It's awful. I'm trying to book a trip to Tel Aviv on UA in a fare class that will allow me to use GPUs to upgrade to C. No matter what, the return always comes up in S or T class which are not eligible, even though the lowest fare on united.com shows an M fare, no S or T. The "show other fares" button rarely brings up anything besides a $3800 B fare which I can't purchase without setting off all kinds of alarms.

Any way to trick this thing?

Nope. Your version of Concur won't show fare classes because your employer or your employer's TA have set it up not to show fare classes. There's no trickery involved. We allow our people access and if one plugs in a routing, the fare bases sort out by various categories such as class of service, flexibility and the like. We also get a screen showing less expensive alternatives and a pop up screen asking for a brief explanation when there's more than $200 difference.

The starting point is to speak with your employer to determine why they don't want this level of access. For what it's worth, that reason might be exactly the reason you want it.

It does show the fare class on a selected itin, before booking, but I can't get it to cough up higher fare classes, which in some cases are only $25-50 more. But yes, I'm sure my employer wants to force the lowest fare class.

I'll just call CWT tomorrow. Thanks.

Again, that's your employer, not Concur. If you select "refundable" and "Coach" it ought to show you Y and anything else refundable. If you select non-refundable, it should show you the entire range from cheapest to most expensive (which are available).

Part of this is that some employers won't allow their corporate TA to hold a second personal CC and charge the difference between what the employer pays and what the employee wants to a personal CC.

Your example is a good one. If you can effectively sit up front for $25, that's generally a wise use of your funds

Yeah I don't even have that option. It always shows the cheapest fare. I can get it to "show other fares" but rarely does it offer anything except an expensive B fare.

I'm running into the same problem with Concur. But, I'm also realizing that once the booking is complete with Concur, everything gets passed over to DL.

Has anyone had success in completing the booking with Concur, then getting the airline to move up your fare class and charge the difference (either changing the original charge before it's processed or just running a separate charge) within the 24-hour rule?

If I can get that to work, the $30 difference it'd cost me to go from Y to a lie-flat J on a transcon redeye in a couple weeks is something I'm more than willing to pay myself...

Our work uses "The Travel Team" which is run by Amex's Concur (I believe, at least that's what the top corner says) and I choose to book my own travel manually rather than using it. Seems like it always has issues and flags pop up all the time. Becomes a huge headache to try and book that way.

I am also interested in the answer to this question -- has anyone been successful? I want to do this for an upcoming trip (go from E->B on my own $$)

I found out recently that if you call in soon after ticketing, DL can indeed bump up the fare class and take the additional collection directly from you.

However, I also got the nasty surprise that if your employer has set a coach-only policy, Concur will offer you UP fares (due to their underlying fare codes being in the coach classes), collect the appropriate fare, but then force the booking out of First. The net effect is that you've paid for an A fare but are sitting in the back. Calling DL can often fix this, except when the rest of the A inventory sells out between your booking and phone call, in which case DL claims they can't do anything without collecting the fare difference to P or F...

Not sure if there is any update here. Recently I will need to book flight tickets via Concur as the first time. I could not find more coach fare class options. For example, for United I saw K, refundable K, and then B and above. But I just needed W to use GPU. Is there anyway to choose different coach fare classes? Thanks.