mozilla

LX will only offer the IATA multilateral interlineable fares, and they will be discontinued soon.

LH offers interlineable fares that can be freely used in the LH group (with max permitted mileage restriction), can be ticketed on 016 (PQD-eligible) and are significantly cheaper than the IATA fares, so probably a better option.

jsloan

I assume you mean the Y77 fare? In this particular case, it's not that much cheaper than the IATA YY fares, but if you're going to buy a Y fare anyway, I suppose that's the one to buy.

I'm having trouble understanding the flight application, though. For this specific example, AMS-ZRH, I find that I cannot use LH Y77 on the nonstop LX flight, but rather I'm required to travel via either FRA or MUC (more expensive due to MPM). I do seem to be able to route on LX metal from FRA/MUC to ZRH and vice versa, though. These results are consistent between United.com and the ITA Matrix -- one-stop itineraries but not non-stop.

Still, since these tickets are a good 8x-10x more expensive than discount fares, I imagine most people would rather just buy them directly from Swiss and forfeit the PQD. (Or: use 8K miles each way for an award ticket).

UA_Flyer

mozilla

While I'm not sure what is causing this, it does seem to require at least one LH flight number on the ticket, be it an LH metal or codeshare number. After that, only the MPM requirement remains, making about every IATA-carrier flight in the EU, be it *A or not, available for 016 ticketing (with exceptions here and there I guess).

You can ticket a nonstop itinerary on LH.Y77 if there is a nonstop LH codeshare operating the segment, e.g. nonstop BRU-HAM flown on SN metal using the LH codeshares. Unfortunately, there is no LH codeshare for the nonstop LX flights AMS-ZRH, hence the requirement for a connection to add a LH flight number on the ticket.

EQDsSUCK

Wow. Thanks for all the great answers and information. Very interesting.

findark

Ironically, I just had an 016-plated LX intra-Europe segment post as "ineligible" for PQD, so this thread seemed topical

At the end of the day I still got even more PQD from other segments on the ticket than I deserved in total, plus distance-based RDMs for the LX segment, so I won't be calling to fix anything, but still strange.

Kacee

Was it Helvetic operated?

findark

Nope, Swiss mainline on a 320. My receipt notes it as operated by "SWISS INTERNATIONAL AIR LINES LTD dba SWISS" -- I can't keep track of Swiss's corporate structure but I assume that's mainline. What's stranger is I could have sworn it posted with PQD and then was retroactively changed to "Ineligible" once a later LH segment posted that had several hundred more PQD than it should. This was all on the same force-reissued ticket that got a UA domestic segment to credit as "ZP class" so I just chalk it up to gremlins in the system. Since I came out ahead on all categories, I'm letting sleeping dogs lie.

Kacee

That's just weird. There were some issues a while back with "Swiss Global" flights (that's the sub that holds the 77Ws) but Swiss International should be fine.

findark

The only other oddity is that I was op-upped on that flight, but as far as I know an op-up is just a change of seat assignment and doesn't actually touch the coupon.

cfischer

no, that's it. It messes up things. Ask for credit and you will get it.