Gnopps

It seems to me all international, published UA-fares I look at are routing-based. I.e. you have to follow choice of routes to get to your destination.
Comparing to DL and AA, they have mostly have mileage-based fares. I.e. you can travel any route as long as you don't exceed the MPM (maximum permitted mileage).

UA's fares at the very top - i.e. the most expensive fares they sell - do permitted mileage-based travel instead of routing-based. But then we're talking about for example economy class of $5000 for transatlantic travel.

Has anyone come across a city-pair that has mostly mileage-based fares for UA?

Lux Flyer

UA has mileage-based fares filed on basically every international city pair in the form of unrestricted J and Y fares (ocassionally get a C/B/M), however UA predominantly uses mileage based fares for their full fare products and the discounted/restricted fares utilize the routing-based filings. Which at it's core makes sense, if you're going to sell someone 8000 miles of travel, you're going to want the fare to cover the cost of that travel whether they use the full amount or not. And also explains why people rarely see them, because they're usually looking to take from the discounted inventory buckets which are almost entirely routing fares.

Also worth noting the *A RTW product is essentially a mileage based fare that does give some discounts when you meet the criteria in the fare rules.

findark

Generally only normal fares (in the technical sense) on UA are mileage based.

I have not seen any discount non-routed fares on UA that I can remember. The Pacific routing templates over Hawaii are extremely generous though if you're trying to simply get distance.

Gnopps

Thank you for your replies! I wasn't really looking for a discussion on routing vs mileage-based, rather if people had come across them in their travels..

Indeed, this is the point I was making in my first post.

There are exceptions however: United does actually switch over to MPM-fares for almost all published premium economy and higher cabin fares to USA out of Thailand, Hong Kong and Japan for example. So I'm looking for city-pairs where MPM-fares are mainly used instead of routing-fares.
Could you please explain your point here? DEL-SFO-LAX for example is 8000 miles flown no matter if the underlying fare is routing-based or MPM-based.

jsloan

The point is that routing-based fares are much more convenient for UA. By keeping people on predictable routes through their system, it allows them to optimize their revenue management calculations and capacity planning. So, UA gives significant discounts on the routing-based fares. It's not DEL-SFO-LAX that's a problem; it's DEL-MAA-NRT-SEA-SFO-BOI-ORD-AUS-LAX or whatnot.

WineCountryUA

Might help if you could explain why you want MPM-fares?

In the distance past award tickets had MPM limits and folks would piece together circuitous routes with 24 hour connections to maximize the "value" of the award. But your query is about paid tickets, are you trying to build an itin with multiple long connections?

Gnopps

Absolutely, I agree that routing fares may be more convenient in that it allows airlines to keep passengers on trunk routes. :-) It is the statement "if you're going to sell someone 8000 miles of travel, you're going to want the fare to cover the cost of that travel whether they use the full amount or not" that I didn't quite get.

I'm curious on how UA has built their fares, and am looking at various ticketing options.

But again, I'm not in any way looking for a discussion on routing vs MPM-based fares - I'm not trying to argue superiority of either. I'm simply looking for routes where UA may have chosen to work with mostly MPM-fares instead of routing-based ones.

Lux Flyer

I'm not sure what you're not understanding.. If you are going to sell a fare that dictates a max permitted mileage of 8,000 miles, then you're going to price that fare to cover your costs/desired revenue as if the customer will utilize the full 8,000 miles. That is what the airline is liable for by selling that fare. Regardless if the passenger chooses to fly 500 miles or 8,000 miles on that fare, the airline is on the hook to potentially transport them for 8,000 miles worth of air travel on that fare component and need to price it accordingly, since when publishing the fare you don't know what routing/mileage amount any particular customer purchasing that fare plans to use (that is the unpredictably that jsloan mentioned).

I think this has already been answered.
On domestic routes UA only publishes routing fares.
On international itineraries their discounted fares are routing fares
On international itineraries their full fare products are milage fares.

UA's fare filings/business decision in this regard doesn't really differ by city pair. If you are looking for their milage based fares then you need to be looking at their international full fare/unrestricted products.

Gnopps

Just so we are on the same page here: You do know that MPM-fares do not carry an arbitrary number of miles that can be flown? As an example DEL-LAX has these rules attached:

• TPM of 8001 => Great circle distance, i.e. the number of miles required to fly a direct flight between these cities
• MPM of 12037 => Allowed total mileage that can be flown
• MPM at 25M of 15046 => Allowed total mileage that can be flown at 25% extra cost

These figures are the same for all airlines and based on IATA-distances (with exceptions). Thus it is literally impossible to fly 500 miles on a fare that has a MPM of 8000, and vice versa. As such, there isn't a need to price accordingly - in fact routing-based fares can often allow a greater distance to be flown than MPM-based fares allow. As I stated in my first post, AA and DL for example work almost exclusively with MPM-fares on several markets.

Again, reverting to what has already been written - I was always referring to international fares (please see first post).
International markets do have discounted MPM-fares (please see post #4 and at bottom of this post).

UA's fare filing in this regard DOES in fact differ by city pair, please see points above. Again, for the n:th time: what I'm looking is basically if anyone has come across if there is a market where MPM-fares are the predominant fare-type. It may very well be that such a city pair does not exist for economy class, but it certainly does for premium economy and business class (included discounted fares). Below is an example of this, fares BKK-LAX sees all premium economy being MPM-based and economy route-based (last letter of the row indicates this with M/R).

WineCountryUA

I am still not following why one cares?

ryman554

When we were qualifying for status with miles, it could come into play for circuitous routings. I suppose, one could make the partner PQP stuff on non-016 tickets (again, mileage per segment based) more attractive, but that's not the question here. So,

1. MM BISbqualification?
2. Many <24h layovers in international itineraries? Like we (I?) used to do for Europe travel?
3. Intellectual curiosity? Learning about fare construction is kinda neat?


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