Kacee

Would be helpful to have more details, but most likely because PE is sold out on EWR-FCO.

WineCountryUA

Can you purchase PremPlus just on EWR-FCO?

Also, try using Multiple City ticketing SFO-EWR and then EWR-FCO.

herquiethands

Hi Kacee, thanks for the response -- here is an example, the departure is Dec 18th. I see now several fare classes are available in the individual non-stops vs. the connecting flight... is this normal? Let me know if there's something else I'm missing 👀

Kacee

The fare class availability will default to the lowest number on either flight. But in this case, EWR-FCO is O9 A0 R0.

I can't explain why UA won't sell an O fare all the way through. Except that there has been lots of funkiness with mismatches between inventory and fares for sale lately.

vbiagiot

Quick question. I have a ton of plus points, but recently booked an economy flight from EWR to LHR with miles. Are the odds of an upgrade on an economy award flight typically slim to none?

mahasamatman

They're zero if you don't have a United credit card (not including cash upgrades).

jsloan

It's normal-ish. What you're seeing is the result of married inventory, where UA keeps an entirely separate set of inventory for each valid combination of flights that they want to market together. It's weird that it's O0, admittedly.

Try multi-city search; you can sometimes get around this kind of issue. It won't affect the way the flights are actually ticketed.

I mean, sort of? It's actually best, IMO, to think of married inventory as completely independent of the underlying flights.

Definitely true.

Most EWR-LHR flights have Premium Plus in addition to Polaris, so you're asking about a two-class operational upgrade. Won't happen, sorry.

Note that your PlusPoints don't help either, unless you're a GS; 1K or below, you can't use PlusPoints to upgrade an award ticket.

EWR-LHR isn't a CPU route. There are no complimentary upgrades available.

Kacee

Multi-city tool will no longer allow same day connections.

Actually, it's the opposite of married segment inventory, since there is no PE inventory on the combined route. It would be married segments if PE was only available from SFO-FCO, not the individual segments.

I'm calling this another manifestation of the rather prevalent recent issues involving mismatches between displayed inventory and fares for sale. I believe there's at least one thread on the issue already.

jsloan

Yes it will; either use the app, or use the low-fare calendar to adjust the date after you start searching. (Yes, it's ridiculous).


It's really the same thing, though. In either case, when you search SFO-FCO, you don't see individual SFO-EWR inventory and EWR-SFO inventory; you see inventory that's specific to SFO-FCO. The fact that they're showing O0 just means that on the married SFO-FCO inventory, the value is O0.

I get what you're saying -- people normally use married inventory to mean "if you want to buy EWR-FCO, you must also buy SFO-EWR." But that's just one manifestation of the same underlying technology: married inventory can be better or worse than the underlying inventory. That's why I was suggesting just to look at it as if they have a completely separate inventory bucket for SFO-FCO; as a matter of fact, I suspect they do.

mahasamatman

Not just different buckets, but different fares with different rules.

Kacee

For sure. But to be clear, UA publishes numerous O, A, and R fares SFO-FCO, so this is not a situation where there is no published fare for the route.

jsloan

Of course, but the two aren't really related.

Prior to married inventory, if you wanted to fly SFO-FCO via EWR on an R fare, you'd look up the SFO-EWR inventory and the EWR-FCO inventory and look to see if there was sufficient inventory in the R bucket in each one. If so, it would ticket.

With married inventory logic, if you want to fly SFO-FCO via EWR on an R fare, you look up the SFO-FCO inventory for the flight combination you want. It's a separate database entry, independent of SFO-EWR or EWR-FCO. This creates a quadratic storage issue -- if you have n flights, you have n^2 combinations of them. (You're obviously not marketing every possible combination, but it's the logical upper bound). That would have been a problem in the 1970s, but it's less so today. Hence, what UA does -- sell its inventory across combinations of connecting flights.

As for SFO-FCO in particular -- somebody probably just screwed up. :/

vbiagiot

Hmm, I have a United Quest card and I booked whatever the premium plus seat is that you can book with 1K. Would an upgrade to economy plus be a possibility?

angetenar

Premium Plus is the premium economy cabin. Economy plus refers to the preferred seating section of the regular economy cabin. That would be a downgrade.

jsloan

You have the two terms switched around. As a 1K, you'd be entitled to free Economy Plus seating without paying a fee. These are extra-legroom seats in the economy cabin. You would not be entitled to Premium Plus unless you selected it (for more miles) during the booking process. It'd be its own column, called "Premium Economy," in the search results.

No, you will not be eligible for a complimentary upgrade to Premium Plus as a 1K on a long-haul route, nor can you use your PlusPoints (because it's an award ticket and you're not Global Services).

Having the Quest card as a 1K would make you eligible for upgrades on routes where complimentary upgrades are available -- e.g., most domestic and short-haul international routes. It does not make any difference on TATL/TPAC flights, where there are no complimentary upgrades in the first place.