HkCaGu

I'm sure this isn't a bug not reported before.

Pricing after summer LAX-GUM-HKG-BUR/ONT/SNA gives me $1400s. Components are LAX-GUM and GUM-BUR/ONT/SNA. Somehow HKG-NRT-LAX is not available; only HKG-SFO is, and LAX costs $50 more than BUR/ONT/SNA. Whatever...as long as I have SFO PreCheck, where I return to doesn't matter.

But when I want to add GUM-SPN-GUM, united.com gives me $1900s-2000s. (Cape Air trip by itself is only $200s.) Meanwhile, ITA, Kayak and Hipmunk would give me $1500s-1600s, as soon as I hit the latter two's redirection button to united.com, it's $1900s-2000s.

Finally, I signed out of united.com, then rebuild the itinerary, and voila, $1500s-1600s. Signing in after seeing this quote, still $1500s-1600s.

Things shouldn't have to be so tricky.

weirdlyndon

While not exactly the same, I had a similar experience today that annoyed/frustrated/angered me. I was searching for SEA-BFL flights for next month as I needed to book my parent's flights home after their cruise. Simple search online showed the cheapest price to be $381/ea for the one way. I decided to check out pricing by using multi-city search, and for the SAME flights I wanted that the general search priced at $381, were now down to $288 when booked as separate point-to-points.

Pretty misleading as a general search should've shown me this cheaper price, but instead showed higher fares. I think this has to do something with how United.com was coded to display only a certain amount of combinations (paging sbm12 as I believe he wrote a post about this a while ago.) The funny thing, too, is the cheaper price I found using multi-city was in a higher fare class (Q) than what the general search showed me at the higher price (K)

mduell

Always use hipmunk to search, then take their link to the assembled itinerary on UA.sux.

The UA.sux flight/fare search is awful, almost to the point I'd call it broken, but remember POSIWID.

UA-NYC

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh

cmculp

There is an entire recent thread on this. Manually constructing routes can indeed give you less expensive options, but better yet, will show you routes that you otherwise wouldn't see. I used this successfully just today.

mduell

This isn't always enough, sometimes you have to use third party tools since even feeding it to UA.sux segment by segment fails to produce the ideal option.

cmculp

True that, although....it has been a few months since I found a route or fare on ITA or Hipmonk that I couldn't get to work on the united site. Recently, for example, though I can't see SFO and DEN connections from SEA to the east coast searching, if I manually enter them segment by segment, the work and price out like the 3rd party sites. (This is how you fly wide body). Progress.