Actually, when I was going to purchase LAX-SFO-ICN-CEB//CEB-MNL//MNL-HND-SFO-LAX, it put all of the flights into C while the CEB-MNL booked into Y. When I deleted the CEB-MNL, it correctly showed P.

But, I was looking at LAX-IAD-ORF-ORD-BGR-ORD-LAX and will only let me book into E (with one segment in B).

http://i.imgur.com/IUiQJvRh.png

http://i.imgur.com/XJvRWkch.png

When I split everything up, the prices comes out to being somewhat cheaper.

http://i.imgur.com/LqcrzUZh.png

http://i.imgur.com/LUCUs9Eh.png

http://i.imgur.com/3FFBhRRh.png

Although with the BGR-LAX, there must be something wonky going on because there are fare classes lower than E that are still available, unless BGR-ORD is filled...which I don't think it is because only 12 seats are taken on the flight, and F is open.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fliers-b...ostly-mistake/

The press is starting to talk about this change...

Thanks for the quick responses, everybody.

This seems completely absurd to me. I now have no reason to be a loyal customer and stick with UA on multi-city itineraries when one of the destinations in not a UA hub.

For example, I frequently do IAH-PHX on Monday then PHX-STL when I'm going "home" on Thursday. If I now have to book one way tickets why would I fly UA? (I will hit 1K status, so that is not a concern). I can instead book PHX-STL on American and not have to fly on a crappy 145. Same with MSP, now I can book Delta. In fact, I can book First in Delta and it's still cheaper!

This was the official response from Premier Voice :rolleyes:

From a pricing perspective, this makes sense. Cheap RT combinations by happenstance were undermining the carriers intended O&D pricing for some city pairs. I'm actually surprised it took them this long to add the end-on-end limitations to the domestic fares.

There's no reason UA would want to make it favorable (cheaper) to route IAH-EWR as IAH-MCO-EWR; it's higher cost and risk for them.

It's not a mistake or a bug. It's intentional repricing of mulitcity and non-through routing. Intentional, and it happened with all the majors on the same day. So don't think as was suggested up thread that picking up your toys and going to another sand box is going to fix it. AA and DL implemented the same fares rules at the same time. Amazing how that happened in a "competitive" industry isn't it though???

To reiterate: this fare rule change affects domestic itineraries. If you have an international leg, it's not subject to the new pricing rules.

I think what you're describing is more like "hidden city" routing. Though in that case it would assume the desired destination is MCO.

But, why not make it "round-trip" pricing if you are starting and ending at the same city? So pricing IAH-MCO-EWR-IAH should not cost three times as much as IAH-MCO MCO-EWR EWR-IAH as three one ways. That is what has happened here.

Sigh, the end of another era. So much of my travel is east coast to western cities which I cannot get to nonstop on UA. Multi-city was for years a way of getting those connecting flights at fares that were competitive with that other carriers would sell as simple rt tix. And often, if I had a preferred routing, multi-city was the only way to get .bomb to show me the itinerary (or when I wanted to make a connection through ORD say 2 hours instead of the shorter 50 minute connection which was all .bomb would sell me).

Bolding mine. If that's all the carriers are trying to do, then they've used a sledgehammer where a sharpened chisel would have done the job just fine.

As the media is noting, this is most punishing to business travelers who need to build multi-city itineraries. Those travelers are not evading "intended O&D pricing" on RT fares. They're just getting gouged.

Moreover, the carriers already build nonstop premiums into their fares on many routes.

Very surprising to me now that the story is out. Only because United claims they are trying to make the airline as friendly to business travelers as possible, only now to penalize us for wanting to book tickets on the same itinerary. I would imagine most business travelers like myself don't have time to mess around with extra stops to cheat the system. I think it is a shortsighted move and seeing all the major airlines do it on the same day raises a lot of questions...

The combinability restrictions were coordinated by all 3 legacy carriers on the same day, according to the Associated Press (see article at http://skift.com/2016/04/06/legacy-a...-city-tickets/ ), in a fairly obvious example of airline collusion.

My notes indicate that the combinability restrictions began to take effect with fares published Monday, 21 March.

The AP notes that what United is trying to do here is prevent you from combining their $39 BOS-ORD Spirit-match fare with their $39 ORD-LAX Spirit-match fare to get a $78 BOS-LAX journey (there have been a bunch of fares and "mileage run deals" posts about this kind of journey in the past year).

Note that I don't think they were trying to kill the kind of multicity stuff that sbm12 has blogged about at e.g. http://blog.wandr.me/2014/02/uniteds...k-very-nicely/ and elsewhere, where UA provided different inventory availability depending on how you structured your search (basically you could use UA's web site to divorce married segments); but they may have reduced the utility of that sort of strategy by restricting the use of one-way fares to cover parts of many kinds of itineraries.

This stuff is really interesting from an online travel agency point of view because now when agents are doing a search for a round trip, they'll need to separately compute (1) price of a simple round trip, (2) price of two one way tickets on the same airline (!), (3) price of several one way tickets all on the same airline (!) with connections of varying length. It's going to be harder for DL/UA flyers to handle because those airlines aren't required under the CoC to honor separate-ticket connections. I can certainly see DL/UA being chintzy here and invalidating the second half of a journey like ORD-DFW-LAX that a traveler booked as two separate tickets to get a cheap Spirit-matching connecting trip.

For AA travelers, there will be a little less pain because AA has a policy to treat separately ticketed oneworld itineraries as though they were booked on a single reservation for purposes of irregular operations / rebooking.

This is not true. Here's an example on AA from back in January that had the end-on-end construction limitations in the fare rules.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/ameri...-open-jaw.html

They may have rolled them out systemwide more recently, but they certainly have been around longer than March.

I noticed that DL no longer permitted combining cheap DTW-ORD and ORD-MSP fares to get between DTW and MSP awhile ago. It definitely started before this year, but not sure exactly when.


Here's a post from 2015 where someone noticed the rule in a fare (not clear of context) --

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/25785664-post42014.html

Nowhere in the article does it say (at least when I read it) that the changes were coordinated on the same day. It does say they all made the same changes, and says "simultaniously" changed the rules, but that doesn't necessarily mean at the exact same time. Indeed, earlier reports on this thread indicate that AA/DL had this happen at least a couple of weeks before UA did it.

Whether it is collusion or not, I don't know, but in multiple industries its normal to see a specific company react to anther's change by doing something similar/the same thing. For example, gas stations across the street from each other often raise prices at roughly the same time. That doesn't necessarily mean its collusion - its certainly possible, but probably almost always the case, that the station with the lower price decided they are losing out on revenue by being cheaper, so decide to raise their own prices.

That still exists though, specifying connecting routings where you are not stopping over, just doing a connection (at least I saw something a couple of days ago where I could do it as a connection and it still priced differently some of the time - and in the past, it was like that too - sometimes it is cheaper to search the connection as a multi-city, sometimes it is cheaper to do it O-D, and sometimes, its the same). I use multi-city because quite often, because UA doesn't bring up even all the reasonable 1-stop connections (and they are regular connections - with say, a 2 hour layover instead of say, 50 minutes). And even when they do bring up the relevant ones, I still check anyway, to make sure I'm not missing a connection I'd rather take (traveling with an infant means I try to avoid <1 hour connections now, even though I'm quite comfortable with them).

The issue for the multi-city where its pricing much higher is when you are stopping, vs. just connecting, i.e. doing a trip EWR-ORD, staying for 2 days, then ORD-CVG, staying for a day, then CVG-EWR.

Here's yet another article about the updated fare rules. http://www.statesman.com/ap/ap/top-n...o-costl/nqzdd/

I understand what they're trying to do here, but it seems they went far too broad. I know there are people that try to "game" the fare rules, but a lot of the people impacted are those that truly need to book the multi-city tickets.

Same AP story, just printed in a different place.

doubtful that anyone at the DOJ will have the balls to throw the book at the majors for this, considering they are always handled with kid gloves...but we can hope...

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR....

I pity the vast majority of travelers who don't know what is going on.

Since I keep up with FT news, I knew to look at multi-city vs one-ways. I had to buy 4 separate tickets to save 44% on an upcoming trip. Nothing fishy here - 3 days in Las Vegas and 5 days in Houston...

One-ways:
OGG-LAS $254 (via one of several displayed HNL/SFO options)
LAS-IAH $81
IAH-LAX $85
LAX-OGG $262
Total $691

Multi-city:
OGG-LAS $451 (via SFO, no HNL/SFO options displayed)
LAS-IAH $181 (same flight as $81 one-way)
IAH-OGG $602 (via LAX, same flights as the $85+$262 one-ways)
Total: $1234