"Married" connection?
 

I am booking a trip from SFO to Istanbul in december through work travel agent.

They came back with LH sfo-fra-Ist with a ~2 hour connection time. I asked to be moved to the sfo-fra flight on united metal, departing an hour earlier than the LH flight. I was told by our travel agent that is considered a married connection and as such is almost 3K more round trip. Wait time in FRA for this flight is exactly 3 hours.

Have never heard of this before. On united.com this comes up as a regularly priced option when doing a search for SFO-IST routing.

I would really prefer to fly United metal for obvious reasons, but can't justify the increased spend. The travel agent did mention they occasionally change the rules on these connections and to try back in a week.

Anyone have experience with this and know how likely it is to change in the next month or so?

Married segments are tied together for pricing and upgrades. In many ways like a special fare for two segments together instead of pricing separately. Sounds like you got a good price on your current itinerary, but the flight you want is simply priced differently.

More reading here:
http://www.airliners.net/aviation-fo....main/3334150/
http://boardingarea.com/thewandering...rfare-pricing/

Sorry, but what's the 'obvious reason' for wanting to fly UA?

Is it because the LH segment won't earn miles based on fare class? Or because you are booked in a high enough economy class that you would like to try and use one of your GPUs (if you have any)?

-RM

Because I want to earn lifetime miles and want to make sure the spend counts towards GS qualification.

Two different PNRs?

OP, make certain that the TA is giving you the same LH connection FRA/IST when using the earlier UA flight. Since I was curious about this, I picked 2 random dates (12/10-12/14), and got interesting results:

UA8828/UA9126 (both LH), the 2:50 dep, priced at $1343 (H/H).
UA903/UA9126, (UA/LH) the 1:50 dep, priced at $1343 (H/H).

but

UA903/TK1588, also the 1:50 dep but dep IST 1 hr earlier than LH, priced at $3595 (Y/B) -- guessing this may be the "married" condition based on the fare classes.

So, maybe when they priced using UA903, they picked the TK flight which became the earliest connection.

I bet you are right - will call them first thing to check.

Thanks!