Originally Posted by emcampbe

not bizarre for UA.

THis hasn't been going on as long as the merged website, and likely prior to that on the CO side. Pricing is supposed to be O-D, so it should be the same. What is happening (most likely) is that UA is intending to offer the higher fare only for your O-D combo, but has lower fares available on each of the separate segments. UAs site isn't checking the married segment availability, and pricing it like the separate segments. IME, the PMUA site didn't allow it (it would check and re-price based on the O-D combo when you selected all segments). Apparently, the MR site is also smart enough to figure it out. While I've found this less often in the last year or two, it still happens. And do note depending on availability, this can also cause the price to go up vs. down.

And even on a recent booking, Google Flights showed me, and allowed me to book a one-way itinerary on AAA-BBB-CCC in T class, where O-D on UA site only showed Q available for those flights, and even specifying multi-city on UA would have booked me into W because T was showing 0 one of the two legs separately (and the other leg T fare likely wasn't combinable with the lowest W fare showing on the other one). Have no idea how Google was able to see availability, and direct me to UA.com to buy at that lower price when i could let do it directly on the Ua site.



Different situation - the thing you talk about first is relatively new (year or so ago) for multi-city circle trips being priced higher then separate one-ways. It's actually better than intiially down, where the price difference ona. Circle trip could be hundreds more than booking as one ways. There's a thread on it somewhere - happened around March or so last year.

For the TATL, one ways have almost always been exhorbinantly more than round trips. Used to be that way domestically too, before the LCC one way pricing became more prominent as they expanded.