st530

MODS: Please move as necessary, but couldn't find an obvious thread.

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Had a rather maddening experience yesterday trying to book business on Oct 20 BOM-IAH. For tax reasons, I have to depart before midnight and prefer *A. For some reason, all of UA/NH and travel web sites would not price a J fare on NH 380 BOM-NRT on Oct 20 followed by UA 6 NRT-IAH on Oct 21. I could book that itinerary but only with the NH segment in Y and the UA segment in J. Conversely, I could get the NH segment in J followed by J segments on NRT-LAX-IAH, but not the NRT-IAH non-stop. Evidently there were J seats available on both NH 380 and UA 6, and I would have paid any reasonable J fare to book them together, but could not even get the option to do so. In the end, I booked BOM-NRT-LAX-IAH, all in J. The upside is I might get upgraded to F on NRT-LAX but still would have preferred the nonstop NRT-IAH.

Anyone know the reason NH/UA would only offer my preferred itinerary as a mixed-class itinerary despite J availability on both individual segments?

WineCountryUA

Likely a multi-carrier version of Fare Class has Inventory - Not Able to Book into?
There are many reasons this could occur, the first is to start witha deep read of the fare rules of the NH and UA flights. There probably is a restriction you are not meeting.

Piecing together various flights requires the fare rules to work together.

findark

20-Oct NH830 is currently sold out in J, so I am guessing you purchased the last seat and your issue was married inventory on BOM-NRT-IAH which suppressed the last seat.

I can price BOM-NRT-IAH using NH380 and NH6450 without any problems as long as inventory validation is off.

jsloan

In general, I agree, but I actually wonder if something else was going on in this particular case.

The Oct 20 departure is now sold out. However, if I try this on ITA Matrix for Oct 18, I get a one-way UA TPAC fare that covers BOM-NRT-IAH and books into J. So there don't immediately seem to be any combination requirements. I wonder if it was some kind of married segment issue, where NH didn't want to sell its last seat as part of a UA through fare? I'm not sure what the mechanism would be for preventing that, though.

OP: If you booked on United, you might be able to do an SDC at Narita. Also, was this a one-way flight, the start of a round-trip, or a change to a return leg?

st530

Thanks. I thought about SDC at NRT but wasn't sure if UA app would let me do that with the first segment (NRT-LAX) on NH. I will definitely try it (especially if the F upgrade doesn't clear).

This was a new one-way booking.

jsloan

The app may or may not allow it, but if you have 016 ticket stock, an agent can do it, assuming there's availability.

For a one-way booking, I can't see any reason that you shouldn't have been able to book the flights as originally desired, so I'm sticking with my first guess -- some kind of inventory restriction imposed by NH.

st530

Thanks, could you elaborate on what you mean by "your issue was married inventory on BOM-NRT-IAH which suppressed the last seat."?

findark

Just because there is a seat available on NH830 BOM-NRT does not mean that NH is willing to sell that seat as part of a combination ("married segments") with NH6450.

The relevant question is the inventory on BOM-NRT-IAH, and it is possible for that to be J0 even if there are individual seats available on the separate segments. Generally, you can force the separate segments by inserting a fare break in NRT, but this is usually prohibitively expensive.

It is possible (and my guess) that BOM-NRT-LAX-IAH had J space, for whatever reason (possibly because NRT-LAX is NH metal), and BOM-NRT-IAH did not. It's entirely up to the marketing carrier how to compute and offer inventory.

st530

I get that the carrier can compute and offer inventory however it wants, and that no one here knows precisely what NH's thinking was in this case, but presumably they are motivated by a desire to maximize revenue, so it seems there should in principle be an algorithm that knows the price at which to offer BOM-NRT-IAH in J that would equal or exceed whatever value NH thinks it would otherwise get by holding the last BOM-NRT J seat for some other itinerary. But maybe I'm giving the algorithms and revenue management too much credit -- this is way above my pay grade.

Or else perhaps there is some other motivation beyond revenue maximization.

findark

Well, there is a theoretical fallback: the end-on-end construction of BOM-NRT + NRT-IAH. Sometimes this fails to price due to combinability reasons (but you can also get two separate tickets), but what you are actually running in to is the delegation rule in your search engine that thinks you would "rather" see BOM-NRT in Y since it's a "short segment" (shorter than NRT-IAH; the computer is using the same logic that would make more sense if I said you don't want to pay triple to price NRT-IAH-AUS in J all the way through versus IAH-AUS in Y). But the fare break solution will involve summing the two fares, which is... expensive (about $9,657 one-way with inventory off).

But yes, some of this comes down to IT limitations.

A more sensible (easier to understand the economics) example of married inventory suppression would be for a UA route like SFO-MSP. The fares permit routing SFO-ORD-MSP, but UA would really, really rather not sell that ticket because SFO-ORD by itself is longer than SFO-MSP and also a more premium O&D market. So UA ends up undercutting its fare table on SFO-ORD, and selling free transportation on ORD-MSP too.

Instead of flatly refusing to serve the route at all, or restricting the fares to X/DEN only, they just have an inventory rule that (rather brutally) suppresses through inventory on SFO-ORD-MSP to far below the inventory offered to ORD. Domestic fare breaks auto-price much more easily than international ones (fewer combination restrictions) and so you will quite frequently see something like only full J available as married segments and the computer will offer you something like SFO-ORD (Z) + ORD-MSP (Z) for the sum of the two fares (still less than SFO-MSP in J). A heavily booked flight might be J0 in through inventory but price in C + D or something with the fare break.