tarheelnj

Strange to see an inverted award chart, with FC less expensive than Y? These are flights from EWR-GSO in October, with wide open seat maps but 0 paid fare availability below E fares around $620. Skip the first offered flight and note the other three. Normally Y saver fares are as low as 7.5k miles. Also not sure what my Premier and Cardmember status is getting me.

mduell

Not really strange when there's saver F and market rate Y.

cfischer

happens all the time.

fumje

Main question already answered.

The message about Premier / Cardmember means you're accessing XN or IN when X or I is unavailable. In this case obviously not XN.

emcampbe

Yes, Ive seen this before. Specifically [relatively] recently when I was almost doing a last minute trip to Canada around Xmas - the week before. Y seats were something like 65K miles OW, but got F (with the majority on a lie flat 777) for something like 53K. Yes - all of these numbers are high - in lighter travel season, and with chart pricing was a 12.5K/25K for a OW award. But given the requisite F fare was something like $3K, and even the Y fare was something close to 1K, miles was the easy choice, and in F. Return I booked something around the same price for PP, which was only a couple of thousand more miles than Y.

High leisure and low business demand will bring this kind of pricing - so this will happen on many kinds of holidays.

audio-nut

That could be but it's terrible RM. I thought Kirby put an investor day slide out a few years ago that they were going to fix RM.

uiucengineer

It might not be unusual but it seems very strange to me.

cfischer

I see it a lot with 763 high-J ... just not a plane with a config that makes a lot of sense with business travel still very depressed. UA got these for the business-heavy routes and it made sense when that investment was made. Currently that's tough to 'fill'

uiucengineer

Inventory-demand mismatch could explain J pricing approaching Y pricing, but not actually crossing it. For that to make sense, there must be some market that actually prefers Y over J and I don't think any of us would buy that.

cfischer

that is only true for cash pricing and not for award pricing. There can be high Y demand and UA does not open X/XN and only offer YN whereas there is IN available. Actually happens not too infrequently, depending on the routes you are searching. I have seen a lot when searching (and finding/booking) 40k IN to Hawaii when YN was 60k. Without access to IN it will happen very very rarely.

findark

Cash fares are priced differentially, which prevents such a cross from occurring regardless of inventory.

If award fares are not, then it is fairly straightforward for an "empty" premium cabin to price lower than Y for award tickets.

loomis

I do not fly UA a lot, but do have the MP Explorer Card. I currently have award flights booked to OGG over Christmas.

My takeaway from the OP is that I should occasionally scan award availability to see if FC awards pop-up later.

Correct? Can't hurt, since all that I have to lose is a little of my time. If so, thanks for the observations, OP!

cfischer

There is a lot, but it is pretty much only IN for which you need Platinum or higher. Doesn't hurt to check, but I to HI is not something you usually ever see.

Joshua

The short answer is that MileagePlus partners pay more for IN awards than XN awards. (Generally speaking it’s hard to book YN awards via partners although not necessarily impossible.)

The glitch is that United doesn’t block this situation off from its own customers. Let’s not give them any ideas though.

VWang1111

Happens for cash fares as well. It makes sense when there is a scarce commodity like economy seats and some businesses have a mandatory economy booking policy, it's in United's best interest to extract more value from the economy seat although most leisure or sensible travelers would definitely choose the premium seat.