Kacee

Yeah you can't draw any meaningful conclusion from that single snapshot.

BH62

Agreed. But it was what it was, and no intention of bashing UA and/or the others. Apparently HA has found a good market for nonstop HI flights from West Coast cities. Otherwise, I/we fly UA as a preference because it generally has good schedules (esp to East Coast & midWest) & Lie Flat seating on TPACs, at generally good prices. Note: both of us are 1Ks & I'm a MM & Ms BH is at 0.9MM & counting.

PilgrimsProgress

Checking random dates in Nov/Dec for LAX/BOM/LAX. Partner flights start at $776 and UA flights start at $1,464 on the UA web site. That's odd that UA is selling tickets for partner airline flights (LH/LX) for so much cheaper than its own in the same marketplace. Does this mean UA is going to drop prices? Just trying to understand the forces at work here.

Darlox

This is pretty common on a lot of UA flights these days, on specific city pairs. IAH-NRT is another, where NH flights often appear to be cheaper than UA.

What's actually going on (in most of the cases I've seen) is that UA publishes fares that approximately match their partners. But then they don't make seats available in the fare buckets corresponding to those prices, while the partner flights do have availability. The NH or LH flights will have P or Z available, while UA metal only has J/C/D.

Last December, UA changed its rev. mgmt. strategy to hold back discount buckets in the hopes of capturing higher-margin fares closer to departure date. I haven't seen any post-analysis on whether this turned out to be a good move or not. But anecdotally, partners are destroying UA's fares for advance sales on some Int'l routes, because of bucket availability!

Richard Chen

The same flight, same cabins for different fare classes should be used to signal to UA that this isn't a change we love. Vote with your dollars!

wpr8e

Not quite.

UA has anti trust with NH TPAC and LX/LH/AC TATL. The fares are jointly determined and given they share revenue/expenses on these sectors, United doesn't care if you fly LX/LH over UA.

This is no different than UA two flights from LGA to ORD leaving an hour apart and selling seats at completely different fares because of the traffic mix and revenue management considerations on a given departure.

PilgrimsProgress

Now if they will only allow UA ETCs to be used on LH/LX metal we would all be happier

Darlox

I've always assumed this to be true as well... however, the "issue" that the OP points out is one that began pretty much right after last December's announced adjustments to their RM bucket-availability strategy. Prior to then, you're absolutely correct, that prices were pretty much in lock-step up to capacity exhaustion.

Now, the FARES are in lock-step, but bucket availability is not. It's pretty common to see NH or LH flights with deep-discount buckets available, but equivalent "competing" UA flights to be W+ or D+ only. (Yes, I know seat map is not indicative of availability, but when the map is empty and it's 4 months out -- but the only fare buckets are W+ -- that's a pretty good indication that RM is coming into play, rather than published fares!!)

UA publishes a K fare LAX-BOM in November, but isn't willing to sell anything below W right now (in several cases, V or Q). Whereas LH metal has K9 showing. Yes, it could be some assessment that the UA flight timings are better-enough to justify higher fares, but the prevalence of this on some city pairs, and the high incidence (especially to Asia) where deep discount buckets open up later on, leads me to believe it's more likely an unintended side-effect of the new RM strategy for UA metal.

BH62

Yes, but if you're renting a Wailea condo (IIRC, quotee has ties to Maui) you're pretty much constrained to traveling on the weekends. Actually, once we had to go a day "early", so we did an overnite at Mama's with all that entails (yummy!).

wpr8e

You need to separate inventory control from pricing. They are correlated but independent entities.

Inventory is controlled by booking class and based on a variety of items (tariffs aka rules, Point of sale POS, time before departure, etc) and there's an associated ranges of fares within each booking class.

While in the JV, pricing is discussed between the partners, inventory management is still controlled by the operating airline (not always true but in this case I'm fairly certain that's the case).

There are many factors controlling inventory. But the main one is current bookings and future demand. Given the size of the networks, a respective brand (UA) might be dominating the US POS and filling up inventory faster than LX or LH on the same sector, but UA isn't taking into account downline capacity beyond the European or Asian hub that may or may not part of the JV. So LH or LX might be willing to open up a cheaper buckets/offer a cheaper fare on a given itinerary because their network benefits by taking a cheaper fare to satisfy downline feeds.

So now I go back to my LGA-ORD example. The same rules apply. There's no way to make any determination on a single flight leg without understanding/knowing what the downstream impact is on the network.

Toller

I looked at prices to HNL one way, with the hope I could return with mileage. They were much higher than I expected.
I then looked at round trips and found the outbound legs were cheaper than for one way trips.

Is that correct, or was there some sort of error?

mahasamatman

That's frequently the case outside the continental U.S.

zrs70

Is this domestic or international? Coach or business?

In general, domestic fare are one way. But not all.

International fares tend to be based on roundtrip.

Let us know a bit more about your itinerary!

Toller

Rochester NY to Honolulu HI. Cheapest possible rate.
I wanted to pay for 3 people to fly there, and use mileage to get back.

The alternative is to pay for two people round trip, and do mine RT on mileage. Anyway to ensure I get all three on the same flights? I have a fear of booking the two and then finding out the third is suddenly not available.

mahasamatman

Since you can always cancel any ticket within 24 hours of purchase, there's really no risk. I would book the award first, though.