WineCountryUA

While agreeing about certain aspects, also agree with the below

Same here even if I predominately book on united.com (and avoid Expedia for international trips -- too many schedule change / refund issues / non-existent customer support with Expedia)

No one search engine is prefect and there are issues with each. But price / convenience shopping is a good idea.

findark

Just to be clear, if OP were to actually click on the box that says "$4,758" and proceed to select a return option, .com will show returns via FRA at the correct ($2,xxx) price. It's basically just failing to figure the "lowest price" round-trip option from among the possible returns.

Personally, I always read the fare table before booking international travel, but YMMV

cpmp

Hi all, I don't usually fly United so rarely ever used their website for booking. Currently looking at a trip to Buenos Aires in the winter, and found an interesting glitch. Wondering if anybody else has ran into this before?

Business Roundtrip YVR-IAH-EZE-IAH-YVR on Nov 3-10 shows $3667 CAD on google flights, and when booked with United using google's link, this price shows up in my cart.

However, just searching for this flight from United's website gives a whopping $20002 CAD!

cfischer

o.k., that is normal. I am sure there are some codeshares involved that google flights in 'calling up'. United.com won't search these; an agent can book them.
Always important to search in various different ways, in particular for intl trips

Kacee

Not that uncommon.

It may not actually ticket on united.com.

cpmp

I was able to ticket it on the lower price from google, paid with their conversion of USD.

iowa guy

When searching to flights on United.com I quite often find less flights available than when searching for the same itinerary. For example, I just booked flights from MFE to BZE that departed MFE at 9:47am. I booked that flight with a link from Kayak.

When I tried to find these same flights on United.com (before and after finding the Kayak flight), they don't show up on United.

Any idea why Kayak would have more flights than United.com for the same itinerary?

thanks

WineCountryUA

If these are both UA flights, multiple city is a booking option on united.com

United.com does not do an exhaustive search and may not show those with longer travel times or significantly more costly or ....

Google Flights also does a better discovery and can link you back to united.com to purchase

iowa guy

Are you saying that some 3rd party sites like Google Flights and Kayak can do a better job of searching for United flights than United.com?

jsloan

Yes, particularly if you’re looking for anything but the shortest possible connection time.

Repooc17

I always start my search from 3rd party consolidators rather than direct with carriers. Comparison shopping allow me to get the best schedule/cost with all options on the table.

xliioper

It would be helpful if you provided more details on flights you booked. Do your flights involve an overnight layover? Many international fares allow layovers of up to 24 hours, but airline sites fare searches will often not show such options, while a number of third party fare search sites will. This isn't unique to United's website. Note that they all basically have the same access to the same fare information and bucket availability through GDS systems. It's possible they are not showing such options because they are unlikely to be purchased. Or there systems are not programmed to do an exhaustive search so that they will provide results more quickly. Note that a number of airlines (including United) license ITA's (now Google) QPX fare search software. But there are almost certainly tuning options for it on which fares it will actually display. https://www.itasoftware.com/
http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers...complexity.pdf

halls120

…and if you want to see partner fares and flights that UA.com doesn’t include. I start all of my flight searches on google flights.

vicontt

This has been discussed before, and it is not uncommon for Google to find UA fares below the ones offered on UA site. This is not a case of cached or dynamic pricing, and *seems* to be a more efficiently constructed fare, perfectly bookable on UA site using direct link from Google.

For the reasons too dull to discuss, I would want to find a way to either book it directly on UA site without google link, or figure out the fare details so that I can call and give them to UA agent.

I did try to recreate the fare using ITA Matrix, but it ended up being higher than both Google and UA for the same flights (

Does anyone have any pointers on how I can do this?

Thanks!

Kacee

Sometimes it's because google's search engine is less sophisticated than UA's, and has failed to validate married segment inventory. In that situation, you won't be able to book the fare that's shown by google, because the married segment restrictions won't allow it.