At 04:54 PM 6/12/2002 +0200, you wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>pardon my ignorance but would one of the travel agents among us please tell
>me exactly what back-to-back ticketing is and why UA has a problem with it?
I'm not a travel agent, but I'll answer anyway.
Suppose I live in Washington but need to spend two work-weeks in Minneapolis.
If I book two tickets for consecutive weeks in which I fly out from
Washington on Sunday night and fly home Friday afternoon, I have two trips,
each without a Saturday night stay, and that excludes me from most discount
fares as set up for North American domestic travel.
Suppose, however, I book one ticket for flying out Sunday night, returning
the Friday afternoon a week and a half away. That qualifies for the
discount fare. Then I book a ticket from MSP to IAD leaving the Friday four
days after I first left Washington, returning to MSP two days later. That,
too, has a Saturday stay -- in my hometown of Washington! :-)
That's "back-to-back" ticketing, and it circumvents the spirit of the fare
classes, which are designed to, um, extract the highest fares from those
who can most afford it, business men who are home Saturday nights. I'm not
supposed to have two tickets currently active, one of which thinks I'm
spending my Saturday "out of town" in Minneapolis and one of which thinks
I'm spending my Saturday "out of town" back in Washington.
To make it less obvious, many folks in this hypothetical situation would
take the middle weekend's flights on a different carrier, such as NW. This
would make it less obvious to UA that I wasn't in MSP over that Saturday
night.
I don't think the airlines have an issue when the traveller leaves the
second town over the weekend to fly to a third town, such as flying
YVR-SFO-YVR in the midst of an IAD-YVR-IAD trip. Certainly I didn't feel
guilty for visiting my parents near SF while on business in Vancouver. ("As
long as I'm on the West Coast anyway....")
>Thanks.
>
>Rgds
>Jan Broe
>EKCH ATC
Nick