United fare construction made easy


a screen shot of a ticket

Okay, so doing anything with airline fare construction isn’t necessarily easy, but there are a few ways to make it easier. For a United Airlines ticket one of the options is to view the full fare breakdown on the website from Saudia Airlines. That doesn’t necessarily make a lot of sense, but it works. The Saudia site has not only the fare details but also shows where the ticket/fare point breaks are and some other details which United hides. That data can be quite useful for figuring out what the PQDs should be for parts of a trip.

And, while it isn’t especially hard to get the data into the Saudia site it is a few extra steps and I typically forget some of it along the way (I’m not so good at bookmarks, it would seem). Plus there’s the part where I like creating little scripts which make the United site easier to use, so I’ve created another one to ease this process.

UA Fare Construction Details

UAReceipt

That link should take you to the Google Chrome web store where you can install the extension into your Chrome browser. It is a simple change, adding a link on the receipt page labeled “Fare Construction” (and called out with that ghetto arrow in the screenshot above). Click that link and it’ll pop up a new tab/page with the full details of your ticket from the Saudia site. I’ve tested with revenue and award tickets. I’ve tested on single and multi-passenger reservations. It seems to work on all of them.

If you don’t use Chrome or would prefer to install the script directly for some reason you can get it here.

Pulling up the details on one of my upcoming trips looks like this:

image

The fine print at the bottom reads:

/FC /FC 06ZZZ14EWR UA X/LAX UA X/HNL UA X/GUM UA HKG225.00KLE0ZEM1UA EWR Q4.25 577.00WLX0ZUMF NUC806.25END ROE1.00 XT10.00AY230.00YQ5.50YC7.00XY5.00XA15.50HK XF9.00EWR4.5LAX4.5

That breaks down as:

06ZZZ14EWR UA X/LAX UA X/HNL UA X/GUM UA HKG225.00KLE0ZEM – Outbound fare EWR-HKG via LAX, HNL, GUM booked in KLE0ZEM for $225 base fare

UA EWR Q4.25 577.00WLX0ZUMF – Return to EWR from HKG booked in WLX0ZUMF for $577 base fare plus $4.25

NUC806.25END ROE – Total fare of $806.25 in NUCs (1:1 on dollars; if you bought in a different currency it should convert to NUCs for pricing).

All these are fees or taxes of some sort:

  • 1.00 XT
  • 10.00AY
  • 230.00YQ
  • 5.50YC
  • 7.00XY
  • 5.00XA
  • 15.50HK
  • XF9.00EWR4.5LAX4.5

The YQ line is a fuel surcharge and is included in the PQD earning; the others are all “real” taxes/fees in this case and do not. The final line for the XF is passenger facility charges and includes the breakdown for each airport where such is charged.

An itinerary with an open jaw can look a bit different:

image

image

The /- in there is the ARNK entry which shows that the system doesn’t know how I’m getting to BGO (I’ll take the train) but that it doesn’t really matter as the other bits are OK anyways. This one also doesn’t show all the taxes/fees for some reason. I’m guessing that has to do with where it was booked but I don’t know for sure.

Hopefully some folks will find this useful, or at least vaguely interesting. If nothing else, it can help you figure out how many PQDs to expect for each half of a trip. For the HKG example above I should get ~390 for the outbound ($275+$115 as half of the YQ)  ~340 for the outbound ($225+$115 as half of the YQ) and ~690 for the return ($577+$115). We’ll see how well that holds when it finally happens.

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Seth Miller

I'm Seth, also known as the Wandering Aramean. I was bit by the travel bug 30 years ago and there's no sign of a cure. I fly ~200,000 miles annually; these are my stories. You can connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

19 Comments

  1. Seth – good tools. What would be really useful would be a script / tool that can wade through numerous fares and pick out the ones that allow end-on-end construction, useful for dumping purposes.

  2. Seth,

    you say you’re not good at bookmarking. Have you tried Evernote? Great program/service.

  3. Thank you! And as a complete and total aside, since you alluded that this was an actual reservation, are you taking the Island Hopper from HNL to GUM? I’m going this week! (And on to HKG because air fares to GUM were outrageous).

    1. Yes, I’m dong the Hopper with a bunch of friends in a couple weeks. Some segments upgraded but most in coach. Should be quite an adventure. Fortunately the return HKG-EWR confirmed into BusinessFirst at the time of booking.

    1. It should be pretty much identical to the ITA breakdown, but generating the ITA details after the ticket is purchased is typically more complicated than not. This lets you go with the real numbers after the fact.

  4. Or, United could just publish PDQS EARNED on their own website along with each fare just like airlines post MILES EARNED – how long until that happens?

  5. Good post, but one correction. The ROE 1.00 means the rate of exchange in conversion of your currency to the NUC. Since you’re in USD it’s 1.00. The 1.00 doesn’t go with the XT, XT signals the beginning of the “taxes” section. The first tax is the $10 AY (Sep 11th) fee and the last is the XFs (2 $4.50 Airport PFCs) which along with everything in between comes to the indicated total of $282.

    FYI – I know you can (or used to be able to) do something similar on the Delta website, and I believe it wasn’t limited to just Delta reservations since I saved a link with a USAirways ticket number.

    https://www.delta.com/myitinerary/popup_viewfare.action?eTktNbr=037XXX585XXX34&firstName=Santa&lastName=Claus

  6. Thanks, Seth. I have downloaded it (I think!) to my chrome browser. I shall test it on some reservations I have.

    You know what a klutz I am with technology ….. ๐Ÿ˜€
    Julie

  7. I think you have a little mistake:
    “outbound ($275+$115 as half of the YQ)” should be $225 riht?

  8. can you please advise me if this kind of UA award routing is legal?

    outbound: USA->Caribbean(or maybe S America)(stopover)->Europe(via USA)
    return: Europe-USA

    thanks!

Comments are closed.