Zeug

Hi all,

Need to get back to the EU for work. Was looking at business tickets for early March and found a good fare on ITA Matrix, but cant seem to replicate it on UA or LH. Similar fares are available on google/flights, but when they take me to UA, it triples in price. Do I need to us a third party booking service? If so, any recommendations and advice?

Thanks!

Kacee

Have you tried google flights? If that doesn't work, you need to call UA and just feed the agent the flight numbers. (It's also possible to book Matrix itineraries on Priceline, but that typically results in a bulk fare and I wouldn't recommend it).

findark

Unfortunately I don't think this is going to be possible. That fare (PUAX10) has been floating around ITA for a couple of months right now. My best guess is that it's a private fare that somehow ended up in their database.. I do not see it in any other source of fares, and the rules contain, among other things:

cat15:
cat27:
Unfortunately I think you're stuck with the (substantially more expensive) Z fare - although there is a $6k fare on SAS.

milepig

I'm seeing the same result.

I tried booking directly on United, both as a single open jaw and as a four-city multi city booking, and am seeing the $9,970 fare in both cases. It is indeed booking into Z.

ITA flight matrix indeed shows the $3,409 price with the code PUAX10.

Google flights first finds the $3,409 fare, but when you build it the amount changes to $9,790.

Here's the entire Matrix fare construction string:
Some googlng led me to believe that PUAX10 might be a LH midweek business fare, but I also couldn't bring up the fare on their site.

I think you're seeing a blip in the system.

Zeug

Thanks guys. I figured as much. I tried Google/flights and lufthansa.de using a vpn to Frankfurt as well. Both options come up over $9K. I think I will be looking to use a GPU instead. I appreciate the help confirming the situ.

Zeug

mahasamatman

ITA frequently offers fares that don't exist. I've just learned to accept it.

sinoflyer

Technically, these fares exist. They could very well be consolidator fares but not available through the "normal" distribution channels.

I'm actually glad to see these fares slipping out on ITA, because it kinda shows how much discounting actually goes on with the airlines to fill those J cabins.

mahasamatman

If it's not bookable, it doesn't exist for all practical purposes. Should they start listing NRSA fares for all flights?

You may appreciate unreliable and useless information. I don't. And it's not just for J.

mozilla

I don't believe ITA/Google has access to private fares, as this would not be very useful. This particular fare is a public fare available through the usual distribution channels, it's just restricted to one or more vendors. ITA doesn't seem to do a complete validation of all sales restrictions, while Google does. The really interesting fares are not available through the normal channels, and ITA will probably never see them either, so there's still a lot of stuff we don't know. Agree on your second point.

If OP could find out who the "specific agents" are - and that's the hard part - he could maybe book the fare with them and save $$$$, but it will depend on more factors. I remember there was something similar and it was restricted to a few Chinese agents.

milepig

I get what you're saying, but in reality fares exist all the time that have no inventory in the bucket, so they're not bookable. Just the filing of a fare does not insure that inventory exists.

Zeug

This is a different flight, but the same type of response I get from Google/flights. "Call a travel agent" I assume it is a very specific travel agent and I doubt I could identify who it is.

findark

Yes, given the cat27 annotation I would assume it is a specific tour agency who is contracted to sell as part of a tour package. That fare is published for almost every city pair US/Europe and has been messing up my searches for a while. ITA seems to only price it when TATL is on LH marketed UA metal.

rob_flies_ua

Go to unitedvacations.com, look at more options to get a multi-destination vacation, do cos-ams on 3/7, stay 1 night, paris as next destination but do not need a car, nor flight, nor hotel, however many nights it is to get to the return on 3/15, additional flight options -> united business, select the flights in your screenshot (as UA coded, UA operated, not the LH code on UA metal), change the hotel and sort by price lowest->highest and I can get a price of $3,654.88 for your itinerary (actually, I messed up and selected 3 nights of hotel in AMS, so you can probably get it even cheaper by doing the 1 night hotel thing): https://i.imgur.com/OgK38fr.png
You might also need to enter the sale code of EURSALE1 or EURSALEMS1 (http://vacations.united.com/deals/deal.aspx?deal=1166)

milepig

rob_flies_ua

https://deemadmin.atlassian.net/wiki...O+Distribution