txp

Hi everyone,

I have noticed an interesting anomaly in pricing. Say that the inventory for a given flight is Z2 P1. Suppose the P fare is $400 and the Z fare is $600.

If I want to buy only one ticket, the quoted price is $400, as it should be. But if I want to buy two tickets, the quoted price is $1,200 instead of $1,000. Why? You can easily work around this by buying the two tickets separately.

D582

All passengers on the same PNR have to have the same itinerary (flights, dates, booking class) - you can't book 1 in Z and 1 P. So in this case it would either book in Z at $600x2 = $1200, or with UA's continuous pricing it could book into P with some price >$400x2=$800 and <$600x2=$1200

moondog

Don't almost all reservation systems use that logic? It would be kind of confusing if persons 1 and 2 were bound by different rules. If they book separately, then it's a lot clearer.

IAH-OIL-TRASH

Obviously, there's only ticket available at the lower fare class. Since fare classes cannot be mixed on the same record, one has to pay the higher fare class to get two tickets on the same record. The work-around is as you pointed out.

txp

Why can you not have two tickets on the same record in two different fare buckets: one in P, another in Z? Sounds like an artificial restriction with no logic. A relic of the Unix era?

moondog

Because they are different products.

txp

I apologize but this seems a bit of a tautology. So please allow me to ask the question differently -- why can't you have two different products in the same record?

Kacee

It was originally an IT limitation; whether that remains the reason I don't know. It's an airline-favoring restriction so from their perspective, there's no incentive to change.

IAH-OIL-TRASH

One fare class might have a different advance purchase requirement or cancellation policy then the other. Fare classes aren't just random letters filled with random prices to annoy people. They often come with different restrictions. United wants a reservation and its listed passengers to be under the same terms. Seems pretty straight-forward and reasonable. We benefit from the variety of fares UA provides, and sometimes they can scrape a little extra at the fare bucket margins.

Lux Flyer

Because you're working off services, standards and common interfaces which were developed 50+ years ago and are still limited by those initial decisions due to the need to communicate with other airlines reservations systems. The change you're asking for would require every one you interline with and they interline with to all reprogram their reservations systems to handle this change. And airlines have a hard enough time to get reservations to update properly & stay in sync when one partner makes a change, that there is bigger fish to fry then going after supporting multiple booking codes in a same reservation.

As an example, lets say SHARES suddenly has the ability to support multiple bookings codes in a single reservation, but there is a LH flight the passenger is connecting to - how do I transmit that to LH if Amadeus doesn't also support that capability? Am I making two separate reservations on LH's end to account for each booking code? Which passenger gets which? What if I want to make a change for only one of the passengers? WHat if LH has a schedule change, how do they send that message from 2 PNRs back to a single PNR in UA's system? ETc.

The more straight-forward solution is to keep your existing PNR structure for commonality with your interline partners and find some other way to provide a proper link of the PNR so for all intents they're treated as if they're travelling together in your own system, as that doesn't require a huge buy-in/investment for all airlines.

txp

This is what I meant when I said it was a relic of unix!

OK, I finally understood. It is path-dependent. Initially, an IT limitation, no one has any incentive to change now because the costs would be prohibitive.

Traveling on separate records is annoying in case of changes or cancellations. It happened to me once when a flight was canceled, and different passengers were rebooked on different flights. It took hours on the phone to sort this out. Since that time, I usually pay the premium and book everyone at the higher bucket. But I wished someone corrected this 1970s relic. Seriously.

paperwastage

No benefit for airlines to do this.


On the other hand, as mentioned above, united has (monetary) reasons to introduce continuous pricing, which has potential to alleviate some of this pain from the consumer side

WineCountryUA

No, COBOL

And as mentioned having a PNR with individual tickets having different fare classes that have different fare rules would make nightmare in ticket changes

txp

I stand corrected. Yes, it is how COBOL works. I meant "Unix" more as a vernacular for mainframe computers...

Speaking of path-dependent relics, I wish someone would start a thread in a different forum on why we are still using 1950s communication tools in air traffic control -- verbal instructions conveyed by radio!

ctownflyer

UA can certainly have different rules for different passengers in the same PNR, just look at baggage allowance for cardholder's companions. They just only do it when it benefits UA.