iflyuaaa

i've always gotten ua to be able to match what i can pull up on ITA, however it usually takes over an hour. the agents sometimes will even get the computer to price it exactly correctly but they think i cheated so they go through rate desk and supervisors to double check their work. if you feed them segment by segment in which booking code, they can get their computer to do it. i think there's an 8 segment max (in the PMUA days, i got 12 on a single PNR).

i've usually only done this for complex MR's which involve backtracking and unnatural connections. it's much less frequent today becuase they've tightened up their routing rules so much - oh how i miss the old days of a transcon round trip with 8 segments: sjc-sba-lax-san-iad-XXX and back. or when a schedule change allowed you to make it sjc-sba-lax-den-sfo-iad and back (didn't someone this week just get lax-hnl-ewr as a weather reroute?)

i had to buy a flight on AA and it was actually chaper with a weird search i found on ITA that i coudln't get the AA website to price. it added some odd connections which i really didn't want but was willing to do to save the company $300. they kept getting $1500, so i figured out how to trick their system and get the right price. ITA showed it was pricing 2 separate fares. SJC-LAX and LAX-XXX (in europe). When the agent did segment by segment it was giving a very expensive price. Since I saw the fare constrcution on ITA, i had them price just LAX-XXX and back and it was correct. then I had them add in the SJC-LAX. and then add in LAX-SJC on the return. and voila. it worked. they got it to match ITA exactly. the agent was shocked at the fare and how much it dropped when she did that. she asked how i found the fare, and i said i was just playing on a travel agency website.

good luck!