travelmad478

Infrequent UA flyer here, flying PHL-ORD-YVR tomorrow. My PHL-ORD flight, UA2209, is in XN class (coach) and my ORD-YVR flight, AC8041, is in I class (business). Will I have lounge access in PHL and/or ORD?

WineCountryUA

With no Star Alliance status, you will not have access at PHL but will have United Club access (but not Polaris Lounge) at ORD.

travelmad478

Thanks very much for the quick reply. I have a couple of free United Club passes so will pull one out for my stay in PHL.

frontenac551

I'm pretty sure that the answer is "Wait until the complete trip is done before worrying about it", but...

I recently flew the first leg of a multi-city itinerary. First leg booked in W and upgraded with a GPU and second leg booked in Z. The mileage accrual information on my eTicket said that this first leg should be 308 PQD and 3388 award miles. However, I actually got 847 award miles and 77 PQD (note that I don't live in the US, so the PQD don't actually matter). Should I assume that my second leg (return home but from a different city than my arrival city), should see higher than expected award miles/PQD such that my total remains the same as shown in my eTicket (and what would be expected based on the ticket cost)?

WineCountryUA

Yes

Yes, this is not uncommon -- just worry about ticket PQD totals and not posted PQDs for individual segments

Aussienarelle

So most of the time my son flies on my miles but he does have a mileage balance that expires in 2019. I would normally purchase some flowers or similar to have some miles added to his account before the miles expire but I am curious whether I need to do this as he is 1K due to being my MM nominee. Do his miles expire if he requalifies as 1K each year due to MM status, so lifetime gold?

jsloan

Yes.

landrew

I spent a LOT of time over the weekend on the site and with agents trying to hash out a complicated itinerary. At one point, I was told by an agent that if she searched by my criteria (a multi-city search because preferred connecting cities varied inbound-outbound) that the price would be higher.

Is there any truth to this? I often find that to easily find a particular routing I HAVE to do a multi-city search or my choice will not appear or it will be buried in pages and pages of less desirable options.

I can't just exclude either of the cities (although I can exclude known bad connectors) or it wouldn't show up at all.

SO, does anyone know whether what the agent was saying is true, or was she perhaps trying to reduce the burden of the request?

Also, I got the impression several times that the agents were combing through the exact same mess of options that I was (one of them said "four pages here" and seemed to be sorting out non-long haul upgrade award option connections just as I was.)(she suggested some bizarre choices that I had already seen and discarded. I couldn't seem to just tell her what I wanted and have her punch it in and give me a fare.)

Do they in fact use the exact same software that we use to find flights/fares? Just wondering.

WineCountryUA

pricing itins via multi-city can be
1) Higher
2) lower
3) the same (+- a tax/ security fee / airport fee difference)

It is usually one of the above

I have seen all
Fare rules and fare combinability are one of the more convoluted concepts mankind has derived

The use the filters do not change the results, it just eliminates their display

Multi-city searches are truly different searches

Kacee

No that's not correct. It may be more expensive, or it may not, depending on the fare rules. The issue is whether the itinerary prices as a through-fare or end-on-end.

Have you tried putting the itinerary together using googleflights and then clicking through to book?

findark

Paid or award? If award, true.

If paid, searching as multi-city may sometimes yield different results due to a bug in how the UA website validates inventory. However, in principle, it should always be the same. Agents have the ability to manually construct an itinerary in SHARES and submit it for auto-pricing; simply do it yourself in ITA Matrix and feed them each segment (departure date, origin, destination, flight number, booking code, in that order) and the computer will price it.

jsloan

Well, it depends upon a lot of factors. If the fare can be priced as a through fare, then, yes, it shouldn't matter. But that doesn't mean that you can fly YVR-YYZ-ATL-IAH-SEA for the same price as YVR-SEA. "Preferred connecting cities" (from the OP) could be a red flag.

I do agree that if an itinerary is returned by an origin to destination search, it should be priced the same if you find the same itinerary via multi-city search; however, the auto-pricing engine isn't perfect.

OP: I had something similar happen once, when the agent was clearly unhappy with my flight choices, somehow managed to price it improperly, and basically left me feeling like I'd somehow been the worst caller of her day. I told her I wasn't interested, took a couple of deep breaths, called back and got a better agent who was happy to price the fare the way I wanted it. (Well, I got shy about a couple of the connections and tried to simplify them. But it was basically the way I wanted it, anyway. Long story short: HUCA.

findark

Yeah, that's what I meant

Every once in a while something goes wrong when I have an agent key in a whole itinerary.. I usually assume it's that the agent didn't type it in correctly when it doesn't price, but whatever it is HUCA fixes it right up. I have to do this for basically every LH E fare I was to GPU, so I have a good bit of practice (also doing the same with Chase/Citi TAs to get 016 GPUable tickets)

sjwoo

I just got an award ticket for VIE-EWR (one way because I'm flying on BA for EWR-VIE). It's an economy ticket, class X. On the United receipt, it says I get a checked bag for free, but when I use the Austrian number and look up the booking, I get this ugly response:

"Your booked fare includes 1 piece of hand luggage only!"

Who's right? And is this what's happening now, that award tickets for economy for other airlines gets the worst possible class so I'd have to pay for checked bags?

airoli

On X class with OS, you get 1 free checked bag (+1 more if you are *G). So UA is right.