Fare class availability weirdness
 

Was looking for two tickets (me and Mrs) and noticed that there is only one available for the flight I wanted at the lowest price as it showed ...T9 L9 K1.
So I bought the first ticket for her (I can use the higher PQD) and then to my surprise, when I searched again for myself it still showed T9 L9 K1 and I was able to buy another one in K for the same price. Ticketing went through as well. And I wasn't in a real rush so a couple minutes passed between the two (although I might have searched for the second ticket before the first eticket arrived).

If I search now (about 10 min later), it does show K0.

No complaints here, but wouldn't it be problematic in general if availability is not updated right away (i.e. selling the last seat multiple times)? Maybe it's just a glitch, because this is not the first time I buy separate tickets to take advantage of a single spot at a lower price, and this never happened before.

Or United is willing to sell 2 seats, just not on the same PNR. @:-)

My TA (remember those?) used to be able to do a trick where she called up the same itin on two screens and then released them, grabbing the same lowest fare twice, but I think someone figured this out.

I recently tried to book two PNRs this way after failing to book it as 2 seats on a single PNR. I already suspected there was only one available for at least one leg as by ooking in places like Google Flights I found that 2 seats were pricing out at more than twice the cost of a single.

I got them both up on UA on two screens and got all the way through to the pricing screen, both at the lower fare. I released the first seat on UA which went through and the second one got a failure message. After I backed all the way out it repriced it at the higher fare I would have been charged for both had I booked them on a single PNR. At least I got one at the lower fare.

Maybe a TA's access worked differently. 17+ years ago, a friend and I were each buying a ticket to SYD, back before UA had a 24 hr cancellation policy...we purchased them separately so that we could each use our own credit card. We didn't realize that there was only one ticket at the lower fare and we both tried to buy it within seconds of each other from 2 different computers. He got it and I didn't. When I tried again, my price was a lot higher so we had to convince an agent to refund his ticket so that we could then get tickets for a different flight that had 2 tickets available at the cheaper fare.

Could be a glitch, but also there's no guarantee that selling a seat in K from K1 leads to K0. It usually does, but no promises.

I'm impressed a TA would do this - seems like a great way to get a debit memo.

She was trained the old fashioned way and knew every trick there was - I was just getting started with this travel stuff and was broke. She didn't do it a lot (at least for me) and I suspect it was one of those "just don't do it all the time" things. She was also a master at pricing tickets through a sequence of adding and deleting segments to get the best fare before ticketing. Not throw away or nested stuff, she had a trick to add a segment in the middle and then cancel just that leg before ticketing and the ticket went through.

I can still hear her typing away a mile a minute while I was on the phone with her. Click, click, click, click, pause, "nope" click, click, click click, pause, "GOT IT!!"

She seemed to enjoy the hunt.

Looking a flight right now. Makes no sense, Available fare classes:

• J4
• C4
• D0
• Z0
• P7
• O7
• A0
• R0
• Y7
• B0
• M0
• E0
• U0
• H0
• Q0
• V0
• W0
• S0
• T7
• L7
• K7
• G7

Is it part of a connecting itinerary? Can you replicate that on other source (e.g., ExpertFlyer)?

For months now, Expert Mode has been a disaster for connecting flights. :(

Have had this happen with Saver Awards...appears to only be one left. Grab it, then there is still one left. Worked a couple of times back in the Global First days.

no connecting itinerary. And replicated on EF!

Very strange, then. Somebody must have keyed in a manual inventory override and done it incorrectly. There's obviously no reason for them to set up the inventory that way...