WineCountryUA

Are you booking the infant seat as RT or OW? The discount fare may not be available OW.

paralemo

Always OW (for everything I referenced too). RT would actually be the same or cheaper, but that's a whole other story and since there is an award ticket involved it wouldn't even matter.

Kacee

It matters because the lap infant ticket is priced at 10% of the revenue fare. That's just the rule.

paralemo

You're right. I just meant that since it was an award ticket through united it is always done in one way segments. But it sucks that somehow the roundtrip is cheaper than one way. I wonder why european airlines would do that.

WineCountryUA

Because they can ??? Why are international OWs so expensive, such high fare classes?

But suspect this is the source of why UA is only offering the fare it is. (Lap child tickets are revenue fare and governed by revenue fare rules, not award fare rules).

jsloan

If you have a round-trip award ticket in J, I'd expect that you should be able to get the lap child for 10% of the round-trip price.

Limiting one-way fares to the most expensive fare classes is by no means limited to European airlines. All airlines do it. It's a way to segment traffic; one-way passengers are more likely to be business travelers than leisure travelers, so they charge more. Or, put another way, they offer a discount for round-trip purchases because they believe that discount will disproportionately appeal to leisure travelers. However, OS actually doesn't seem to be doing it -- the one-way fare seems to be a Z fare, which is the second-lowest business class fare class.

Back to the topic at hand... you're flying LAX-VIE-SKG with no intermediate connections? Do you have a stopover at Vienna? I'm looking at the schedule for July, and it seems that's a 35 minute connection. You'll need to deplane, go through passport control, and find your connecting gate in a very short amount of time. It's a legal connection -- OS and VIE are well-known for their aggressive minimum connection times -- but I'm not sure I'd book it myself. (Of course, the flight times may differ on your date...)

What is/are your date(s) of travel? I think this may come down to an inventory issue. The infant fare is 10% of the current adult fare for the day of travel. In other words, it can be $400 on one flight and $900 on another flight just because of the number of seats available in the cabin, even though you won't be making use of any of them in this case. In fact, if the flight were to sell out in J, it's possible that UA couldn't add the infant record at all (!) because there wouldn't be any "inventory" to use. What's really unfortunate is that the UA codeshare currently has much more discount J inventory available than OS on the LAX-VIE flight... but I don't think you can make use of it because award tickets always use native flight numbers (no codeshares) and I expect the infant ticket has to match. Oddly, this means that you should be able to get the price from OS's website but not the price from UA's website (!).

In my search of July, I see the ~$360 infant fare available every Monday, but nearly every other day is the $900 infant fare... when booked via OS flight numbers.

paralemo

Correct on all counts. There is a 35min layover - our plan is to hopefully make it or... sleep over at Vienna until the next day if we don't. I've heard that Vienna is beautiful and that the city is very close to the airport so it sounds like a worst case scenario we could live with (it's will be a big inconvenience but still).

For the prices, I randomly checked a few flights and saw the lower fare on all but if you see $900s then that makes me feel better. I decided to bite the bullet and buy it.

I'll say lesson learned - it was my most expensive award booking and I learned a lot.. without making too many mistakes.

But 9k for a one way ticket when the round trip is less still makes no sense to me. I get what you're saying (though I don't see why biz travelers would fly one way either), however even if that's the case it still doesn't make much sense to do that. Any traveler could simply buy roundtrip and skip the return flight..

Kacee

Vienna is a fantastic city. It's about 30 minutes from the airport by train or taxi (longer with traffic).

jsloan

I'll keep my fingers crossed for you. My biggest concern is that the next flight(s) might be full. As a long-haul business class passenger, in theory Austrian would have a responsibility of care for you, even on an award ticket -- it's part of the Star Alliance guidebook (link) -- but it wouldn't surprise me if they told you that you'd have to wait until award tickets were available.

Well, I was checking July, since I didn't know when you were traveling. Did you check the date that you were actually planning to fly? That's the one that would have been the most important.

Many business travelers take itineraries like LAX-LHR / LHR - ZRH / ZRH-FRA / FRA-NYC / NYC-LAX. These itineraries often end up pricing out most cheaply when using one-way fares. And while you're right that people can (and do) skip the return leg when it makes sense to do so, large companies have more to lose. If UA decides that a company is habitually engaging in a banned ticketing practice (throwaway ticketing is banned by United's Contract of Carriage), you can expect that to come up when the corporate contract is up for renewal. Doing this once or twice is unlikely to raise any red flags, but making a regular practice of it can draw an airline's attention.

paralemo

Yeap -- I skipped June-August in my search because that's high season and I wanted to compare apples to apples (May with September). But I clicked on a few and saw the low infant fares, including my original dates (but they just wouldn't let me book it like that due to technicalities). Either way, I'll stop looking now If the price goes down then I'll never know.

Interesting about the one way tickets... I'll try to ask someone for the real answer though you may be on to something... I'm just thinking that most business flights would be roundtrip anyways. In other words, I would understand charging whatever for biz tickets in general -- if there are people that pay it then it's just smart business -- but not the cheaper roundtrip still. Oh well. One day I'll figure it out!

StuckinITH

You would be surprised by the number of people who move from one country to work in another country and the companies they work for just purchase the one-way ticket. Some only pay Economy, some pay Business and some pay First Class (for their highest level executives). When my father-in-law moved to Hong Kong from Brussels for work, his company paid the one way ticket to HKG in First Class. After that, every year, the roundtrip ticket in First Class for his vacation. And then, when he retired, the one way First Class ticket back to BRU.

choatie88

Called BR and they were happy to take my money & book an infant seat at 10% of the discounted BR fare, about 30% less than what .bomb quoted me. Call was dropped, called BR back and the next agent said they couldn't touch the reservation because it was an 016 ticket and said I should call UA to add babychoatie to the reservation, then call BR again to issue the ticket. Hung up, called again, third BR agent was happy to add babychoatie & take my money.

mherdeg

Does it cost money to upgrade a LH trip from premium economy to business class using a United GPU?

We used the United form at https://www.united.com/web/en-US/app...erUpgrade.aspx to try to apply a GPU for a revenue ticket (LH FRA-IAD). The reservation has 2 adults and 1 lap infant (2 seats, 3 etix, one is an infant eticket). It's on 016 ticket stock with a LH flight number on the relevant segment.

The web UI offered to waitlist an upgrade (from economy to business) and didn't mention anything about needing any money. If the pax associated with the lap infant has their upgrade clear, are they gonna be asked for money? how much? how can I tell?

UAX_Brasilia

I'm not positive, but you may have to pay 10% of the front cabin fare, for the infant.

cfischer

are you using 2 or 3 GPUs. There is no money involved using GPUs on LH.