Huh. Indeed, all three legacy carriers now have a similar provision in cat 10 prohibiting multi-component circle trips. This is just bizarre as I can't imagine a business reason why they would do this on purpose.

Less competition, good for all of us they say.

Why? Competitors react to each other all the time. Especially in this industry. If its done with each carrier making the independent decision to match, its not collusion, just business (even if it doesn't benefit the traveler). If competitors couldn't independently react to one another, every fare raise ever made, probably since deregulation, would be considered collusion if this was the case.

And isn't the DOJ already investigating the majors for collusion? Doubt any of those a part of that would do anything that could even remotely have a chance of being considered collusion while they know they are being investigated.

This situation is a bit different than fare matching though... Prices on circle trips have increased by like 300-400%. If one airline were to do that, the others would have little/no justification to raise it above what they would otherwise charge for one-ways in the market.

It's either one airline made a mistake and others followed without vetting, or they are in some sort of agreement to change the rules.

Well, except they can price how they want, short of colluding...unless you can tell me with a straight face that aside from this with circle trips, airline pricing is almost always completely logical to the traveler eye. Their justification can be keeping in line with the competition. Isn't that the same justification used for fare raises. Baggage fees. YQ. And so on.

Maybe it was a mistake or maybe it was completely on purpose. Now I don't think it's very logical, but perhaps the airlines RM suspected that these types of trips were being done primarily by business travelers, so they thought they could hose them while having little impact on leisure folks who will only go if the price is low enough. I don't know. But it's quite possible.

After trying to price a multi-city itinerary since last Saturday with zero success I finally broke down and called the 1K desk. The agent couldn't get it to price so she sent it to the rate desk. Guess what? The rate desk couldn't price it either! Not complicated, it priced out fine earlier last week on the website. Should have bought it then. Sad state of affairs on United.com!

So what was the final result? Is anyone going to look into it? Should more of us who book multi-city call in?

I finally said screw it and booked a handful of one-ways. So annoying...

It wouldn't even price AAA-DEN/COS-AAA with a normal price. Sure, technically an open jaw, but come on....

I'm about to do that as well. The problems, of course, are that the cancel/change fees on three one-way tickets are thrice what they would be on the multi-city and that a delay / cancellation of one leg could potentially make the subsequent, technically unrelated, legs useless.

Sending bad karma waves Oscar's way.

I noticed this on DL a couple months ago. I was going to add a DL non-stop segment in the middle of a United trip and it was easy and cheap. Then I decided to price the trip using just UA and just DL and it was much more expensive using just DL. At that time just UA for the circle wasn't much different in price but the middle segment wasn't timed well for me to use the connection so I booked UA-DL-UA and got the price and convenience I wanted.

That's what happened with me too on an open jaw, think I posted earlier, though to a lesser extent. Am going CVG-PHX-YYZ (and completing the last leg using my Air Miles that are expiring in a few months for a short segment that is >$300 anyway no matter how it's booked).

Was looking before the change, and as an open jaw, priced CVG-PHX as a G fare (which is rare, IME, out of here) and PHX-YYZ as a K. But after the change, the outbound price jumped to an S I think, at a +$100 premium (where the YYZ fare remained the same). But when booked as a one-way, the outbound went back to the G fare.

As for those asking, calling in won't help (nor will going back to the old website). This is a change in the fare rules, and unless those are changed, this is going to stay this way.

Pretty sure the fare combinability rules still apply when crossing carriers. There's many cheap fares on DTW-ORD and ORD-MSP on AA, DL, and UA due to WN competition on both markets. Just check any Tue/Wed/Sat a couple weeks or more out. But I haven't found any sites that will combine them on a single DTW-ORD-MSP ticket. They always push you into a higher fare class that does not have the A-B-A combinability restriction. Doesn't matter if you do DL-DL, DL-UA, or UA-AA (can't combine AA/DL fares any more due to lack of interline agreement).

Multi-city pricing issues?
 

Has anybody noticed increases in multi-city pricing lately? Is this just actual pricing or maybe an issue with the search function on the website?

As an example (booked as multi-city):

05/15: AUS-ORD - $491
05/19: ORD-TVC - $569
Total: $1058

05/22: TVC-ORD - $564
05/26: ORD-AUS - $491
Total: $1055

However, if I booked like this:

RT AUS-ORD:

05/15: AUS-ORD - $367
05/26: ORD-AUS - $329
Total: $695

and RT ORD-TVC:

05/19: ORD-TVC - $356
05/22: TVC-ORD - $234
Total: $588

I often book these types of flights, but never see the variations that I've outlined above. In every instance, the "lowest available" fares do not display, but instead just the "flexible" economy. I have multiple other flights this year where I booked multi-segments without issue. I don't necessarily have much of a problem booking them as 2 RTs, but it's a little harder in terms of how we have to submit expenses for my company. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Had the same issue last week on an PWM-SFO-SAN-PWM. Called reservations and they said the issue was the "stop-over" in SFO being less than 24 hrs. for multi-city. So, I booked as three separate one-ways for a whole lot less. I also saw an e-mail from Concur saying that the "multi-city ticking option has been temporarily removed... fares are cheaper when issuing one-way individual tickets."

Already a long Wiki thread on the AA site about this http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/ameri...g-tickets.html

One of the best links about it can be found here: http://www.eturbonews.com/70000/us-d...late-consumer-