I confess I'm rather puzzled by OP's report of First being $1,797 at booking. If he could book a ticket in B, then this should have priced in F... assuming by "simple" OP meant "nonstop".

UA occasionally does crazy things with publishing fares, but generally I think those are rather rare and also not intentional.

Nonstop flights tend to be more expensive than multi-segment connecting flights because other than those here, most travelers just want to get somewhere as quickly and directly as possible.

As for airline fare pricing, this has become as crazy an application of big data as what Wall Street uses. Is it always logical? A lot of times, no. But we just have to live with it, and know the workarounds!

You bought a NYC-HKG ticket with a stopover in KIX.

You're flying 4 hours past your destination and then flying back.. That's a significantly inferior product than the nonstop (or even a logical connection in e.g. Tokyo).
Probably a sensible policy... If an employer cared so little about their employees that they'd make them spend an extra 8 hours flying (in Y) to save a couple hundred $$, I think they'd struggle with attrition.


I'm guessing that the $1700 fare OP was running across is the full FUA fare. My guess would be it's a ua.com display error if he was looking specifically for a refundable fare, but it might also be an autopricing issue with the UPDI.

Dynamic pricing to my ear!
 

Sorry to revive this thread.

I was looking for some one-way tickets from sunny, warm FL to chilly WAS on January 2 last night. I saw sub-$100 price on nonstop flight and did not hesitate to purchase three of them even though I did not have outbound flights on hand at that time. When I checked the same flight today, United only sells the first class ticket for over $1300. The lowest and flexible economy fares are unavailable. Perhaps, IT guys are working hard on this.

Of course, I got three outbound flight tickets at saver rates, departing before Christmas. This is another lucky charm; thanking UA for saving me a ton of money to pay for hotel cost at Key West. :cool:

Sounds like they dropped some inventory and you caught it at just the right time. There is one FLL-IAD nonstop on 2-Jan, with a legal G fare at $74, but the flight is now F0 Y0 (and seatmap shows a fully booked flight).

I think he/she is looking at MCO-IAD.

What is so surprising about this? January 2nd is the day everyone and their family wants to get home due to the end of vacation.

Why blame UA when it's the demand of other people pushing prices up?

Oh, indeed, I just added the extra L to "FL" without thinking. Either way the point stands that there are cheap fares and usually no inventory. RM tries to gouge you on a day like 2-Jan, but they slip up quite frequently.

Yes, it was MCO-IAD 9:00 am flight. The flight was completely full at E- last night. There were some E+ seats and FC seats available. I would guess that nobody purchased any tickets in the past few days before I did last night and UA dropped the price. The fare code was G, indeed. I used google flights and did not see the sub-$100 price there. On UA's website, I saw this low price for all three nonstop flights.

ITA needs to wait for the information to move through the clearinghouse, so Google Flights (which uses ITA as a backend) will usually lag the true inventory and pricing (which is instant on .com for UA operated flights) by up to several hours.