This is not a rant or a bashing at UA. I hope to gather more data points and bring this to light to UA in hope they will address this issue.

I am flying to LAX/BUR this November to attend a fundraiser event and I am not very flexible time-wise, I need to depart after 7pm on Thursday and be back in Pittsburgh around 11pm on Sunday night. As always, for all of my leisure travels, I checked ITA for PIT-LAX/BUR-PIT, ITA gave me a price of $452 for a slightly obscure routing that works for me time-wise [BUR-SFO-PIT does not work because it arrives at midnight, same with DEN which arrives at 12:35am] and the routing was BUR-SFO-IAH-PIT which arrives at 10:52pm while PIT-LAX is nonstop. Even though BUR-SFO-PIT is cheaper at $398.

I went to UA.com, selected Multi-City and put in PIT-LAX and BUR-PIT. UA.com only listed four choices for the return with two via SFO and the other two via DEN for $398-409]. I went back and modified the search criteria for the return and put in BUR-SFO, SFO-IAH, IAH-PIT manually, then UA.com priced it out at $507 in S fare, when T is indeed available [verified by doing a dummy one way booking for BUR-SFO-IAH-PIT]. I went all the way through the booking process to see if the price drops, but at the end it quoted me $507. Annoyed, I just turned off my computer and went to bed.

The following morning, I called my friend all ready to suck it up and pay $507, and verify the timing with him. I double checked on ITA and it still gave me the $452 price. Looked at EF to see if there were any new fares filed, but nada. Then I went back to UA.com and did the exact same thing I did the night before putting in each segment in manually. The initial price shown was $448 [because now UA.com is giving me T for the return], then I continued to select flights then it dropped to $402 where the return was now in K instead of T. I was close to paying a little over $100 more, when $402 was indeed available.

Lately [the last few months], I have been noticing that UA.com is having issues pricing out itineraries properly. It is also frustraing that UA.com is not showing ALL options for a given route that is within the discounted fare rules. This is more prevalent on routing that involves non-traditional connections, but I don't really have a choice since the timing of the SFO/DEN-PIT flights blow. CO.com always had issues giving options that were indeed available, but it always worked just fine when doing multi-city, but now the multi-city feature is buggy and not pricing trips correctly.

Anybody experiencing something similar?

Something similar but not exactly - neither ITA nor Kayak nor UA.com would show a particular double-connection I was looking for, and I had to manually do multi-city seg-by-seg in order to force any of them to show and price LGA-IAD-SFO-LAS

But at least I got Y->JN on the 777 ghetto bird as a reward for all that effort

Yeah, apparently the system is having issues showing all of the options at the lowest fare.

Many people had issues with EWR-IST where UA.com was spitting out $1000+ options when an $838 was available. In order to get the 838 fare, you had to specify "K" fare class in advanced search.

In the case of that IST fare the issue was that the lowest base fare was prioritized even though the YQ made it higher in the end. So the higher base fare/lower YQ combo actually was cheaper but ITA (which is the back-end for United.com) didn't list it as the cheapest based on their search algorithm.

Other than that, this sounds like a great opportunity to get a LFG if you can get another engine to price it.

I definitely have had issues with this recently. I've been casually looking at WAS-Bay Area flights in October to for a trip back home and I can never get united.com, Kayak and ITA to display the same flight options. I do realize when you are looking at DCA, IAD, BWI to SFO, SJC there are countless options between the two when you add in connections...

Last night a specific flight time I wanted showed "4 seats left at this price" on United.com; a $400 redeye which worked out better for me than the other 7am option

Tried to book, but there was a problem on the final screen and said to call

Hell no, I dont want to wait on hold for 20 to 60 minutes

Tried to search again, and the redeye was now $1500+ vs. the $400 7am option

...

Same thing showed on IATA Matrix

Stood by for hours waiting for it to reappear

Then tried Kayak - found my itin for $400 which still didnt show on United or IATA for same price

Clicked through Kayak and booked at United!?!!

So, so grateful
So, so confused

Yes, I recently had the same frustrations trying to book not-too-complicated NYC-AVL-BOS and PDX-NYC-AVL-PDX itineraries, having first identified the options of choice (involving both UA and US flights) on ITA. No amount of manual forcing of connections in the "multicity" function on the UA site would replicate my ITA selection, with the identified fare classes.

My diagnosis of this experience was that (i) (most importantly) the website was suppressing all US flights without a UA codeshare, and (ii) the fare class search function on the website is clunky anyway, even when just searching purely UA metal. And the most frustrating part of the experience was that the UA engine has no way of specifying "I really mean this departure time"; each segment comes up with a large number of irrelevant departure time choices, and on re-searching, the specified departure time gets removed from the previous specification.

In the end, I had to book my preferred options on Orbitz, thereby incurring service fees/commission charges for both the passenger and the airline. UA's greed in trying to suppress competitive (but still *A) options from the website offerings seems to me to be of very dubious financial advantage to the airline.

In my book, the ideal airline website (from the passenger's viewpoint) would be able to input an ITA Matrix itinerary. But given the airlines' blinkered thinking about biasing their booking engines, I'm not holding my breath expecting this any time soon!

Richmond, VA to Shanghai for $600, last minute rt tickets, outbound next week and return early October. Never saw a lower price before. For people living in DC, it is worth driving to Richmond, VA.

I had a problem when I was looking at flights from EWR-BFS a few weeks ago. The pricing offered on the UA website was somehow more expensive than the flights I was pulling up on a regular Expedia search. Because I really wanted to book with the airline directly due to the specific rules of a credit card promotion (5% cash back but only on purchases directly from an air carrier) I called the 800 number and spoke to various reps in India who then quoted me prices that were even higher than what was on their site.

In the end, I just opted to book with Expedia at the lower fare (and I even got my credit card rebate, woot!)

Based on my limited experiences with UA since the merger, and what I've heard from others and read on this board, nothing at that airline works properly. I'm just hoping that my flights actually go on the days they're supposed to.

There are alternate theories to the effect that ITA and Kayak lag.