fortwrestler

Hello All,
I've searched for this and can't find exactly what I'm looking for.

I want to take a trip later this year (let's say BOS - PBI - SAN - BOS
BOS - PBI 3/22
PBI - SAN 3/26
SAN - BOS 3/31

While I know you can book mixed cabins, such as First for BOS to PBI, Economy for PBI to SAN, and First for SAN to BOS, but I was wondering if you could (and if it would be any cheaper to book) mixed cabins within a route (such as BOS - PBI, with PBI - EWR being economy and EWR to PBI being First). I'm not sure if that helps with the cost, but I'm really looking for the longer legs of the flights to be First class and I can sit economy for the 1 - 2 hour segments.

Is this something that i possible?

Thanks for your help and sorry if this is a repeat post, maybe I just don't know what to search for.

findark

It's definitely possible, but it is not likely to accomplish what you want (a cheaper ticket). These markets all price as one-ways, so I'll take PBI-SAN as an example. There are three ways you could have a mixed cabin itinerary.

By default, I found a PBI-IAH-SAN option on your date for $564 in Z, using the fare basis SAA0AKFN from PBI to SAN. If you wanted, say, PBI-IAH to be in Economy instead, you could:

(1) Use the premium fare and forcibly delegate one of the segments to a lower cabin. Depending on the mood the GDS is in, this would book into either S or Y, but since it would use the same fare component the price would be the same. This is what would happen if PBI-IAH were operated by a single cabin aircraft.
(2) Force a fare break in IAH. This gives the two lowest combinable fares on the sectors, WAA4AFDN PBI to HOU (a W fare) and WAA2AKFN HOU to SAN (a Z fare). Total price: $738.
(3) Purchase an Economy ticket and purchase a cash upgrade offer. Here the fare is KAA4AFDN for $177 from PBI to SAN, and an upgrade on IAH-SAN is probably going to be about $200. This turns out to be the cheaper option, but it comes at the loss of PQD for the upgrade, and also the upgrade fee is nonrefundable and non-transferrable if you change your flight.

WineCountryUA

It is possible but whether it will be cheaper or even potentially more expensive, is a case by case situation. You will just have to try this -- depending on your level of booking sophistication, you might want to consider using a phone agent to explore the prcing and then you can either book with them (for a fee) or see if you can book online yourself.

IAH-OIL-TRASH

I can end up with cheaper travel costs occasionally by booking separate tickets. Problem is spending a lot of time looking at various permutations of city-pairs. Some of the biggest saving are the segments where there is a big price drop on BE fares, which one can't combine with others.

docbert

And it's not just BE. As has been discussed in the past few days in Trying to understand nonsensical pricing UA publishing fares that don't allow end-on-end are becoming far more popular, often making it impossible to combine fares at all without bumping the price to stupid levels (ie, up into M or similar fares that do allow end-on-end)

IAH-OIL-TRASH

Perhaps you meant "more common" than "more popular"....

I guess they can be more popular - from UA's perspective, not mine