...this before, I have to admit, but the underlying "why" is the same "why" that leads to flights from a spoke to a hub costing more than a trip between two spokes that connect at the same hub - the pricing is based on the market between the two cities, not the underlying flights.
I've been around a while. I know how airline pricing works. This is not the same as pricing one segment versus a connection that includes that same segment. Also, United (and others) have been doing this for a long, long time. I wrote about it with AA and DL in 2014. blog.wandr.me/2014/06/amer...
Oh, I know you've been around a long time, I enjoy your writing. But you'd raised the question of why consumers think airlines are ripping them off, and I'm just saying to anyone else reading this why, to me at least, it isn't malicious, it's just how their pricing works. The one part I don't...
...understand, and would love to know the answer to, is why the one-way won't price on the "W" fare. Is it a conscious business decision on the part of UA not to offer that fare on a BOS-LHR purchase (or a wider suppression on some types of connections), or is it just a design flaw or a glitch?
My best guess is broken married segment logic in UA's systems.