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Comment by benmarks | Hacker News Reader

I’m not going to divorce my wife so I can run away with United, but I hope this crew has a lot more than the single example to level these charges I hope they are taking care buckets into consideration (right or wrong, changing this at the IT level can’t be quick or easy). It will be curious to see others replicate this and if so, United’s response, because that would be egregious and certainly something for them to resolve.

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Yes, fare classes is the likely explanation. One could say at a cursory glance "but look, they are both Basic Economy!" I would counter with https://www.united.com/ual/en/us/fly/booking/flight/fare-cla...

> Basic Economy tickets may be booked in various fare classes.

Author here. Didn't realize this blew up on HN...

We don't know the cause of the difference in price, but we're comparing two basic economy tickets here so if there's any fare difference, United should at least clarify to the user why...

United and other airlines are running ads [0] on how users can book w/ confidence and get free changes so IMO, it's just irresponsible to have things like this slip through the cracks-- intentional or not.

Overall, United has been consistently being anti-user with their policies related to coronavirus. For example, making users wait 12 months to get a cash refund [1] if your flight is delayed by them. Not a great look.

[0]: https://twitter.com/tejasmanohar/status/1239332916070473728

[1]: https://www.dansdeals.com/points-travel/airlines/united/unit...

My hunch: United is only showing you fares of the same class or higher, even if a cheaper class is available

See my reply above at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22588829 why Basic Economy alone is no explanation.

I was able to replicate this scenario with another booking. Definitely not just a lone incident. United sucks.

Would you mind posting your itinerary? Collecting more examples here...

Yeah, I'm not going to say United is some shining beacon of a company, but all I'm seeing here is that somebody representing a company that "book[s] a lot of travel" doesn't seem to understand how fare classes work. I'm not saying it's impossible that United is pulling a fast one here, but this blog post does not show sufficient evidence one way or another. If this showed up in my inbox as a bug report, I'd send it back to QA with a request for more information and reproduction steps.

(Former travel industry person who triaged way, way too many bug reports about fare differences when changing flights)

Yeah, this doesn't really pass the sniff test. Can we get details regarding the fare basis codes before/after?

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