What is a "fare component" when buying an airline ticket?

Question

In the terms and conditions for an airline ticket, I have encountered this:

Cancellations rules apply per fare component. When combining fares charge the sum of the cancellation penalties of all cancelled fare components.

The ticket involves two legs, one directly on the airline, and the next leg is on a code share airline.

I'm trying to find out how much it would cost to cancel this ticket, but I'm not sure if there is one or two "fare components" in the ticket.

Specifically, this is a one-way ticket from Lisbon, Portugal to Charlotte, NC on Air Portugal (book.flytap.com).

Answer 1

That's a rather odd fare condition - at least for a non-LCC (low cost carrier) airline. Normally change fees will be charged per ticket/booking, not per fare component.

To make it worse, TAP's website doesn't seem to actually show the fare components when you make a booking.

The best option is likely to use Google's ITA Matrix search tool. When using this tool, after selecting the flights, it will show the "fare breakdown" for the flight, which will include details of the airfares, followed by any taxes/fees/etc.

If there is only one fare component being used, then it will only show one "fare" line, and this will cover the entire trip (eg, LIS to CLT) :

If there's more than one fare component being used, it will show these individually, including details of where each component covers. eg, in this case there's one fare from LIS to LAS, and then a second fare from LAS to LAX :

Answer 2

The fare component is a specific fare for transportation between two cities together with the flights on the ticket that make up the journey between those cities. It is the most basic unit of ticket construction.

Every component consists of exactly one fare and at least one flight. Every flight on the ticket is part of exactly one fare component. The same fare can be used multiple times on a ticket as part of different components. Each of the flights on the component is said to be covered by the associated fare. Fare components can be interrupted by other components in the case of side trips, but components do not interleave one another. A component may also include one or more surface sectors, which are gaps between cities, the travel between which is not provided by the ticket.

One or more consecutive fare components make up a pricing unit (sometimes priceable unit). Each fare component belongs to exactly one pricing unit. The most common pricing units are round trips and one way journeys, but there are a few others such as circle trips and open jaws. Pricing units are set patterns, like the round trip; you cannot necessarily take a bunch of fare components and make that into a pricing unit.

A round trip consists of two components; one outbound and one return. The fare for each component is the same. If different fares were used for the outbound and return, formally this is a two-component circle trip and not a round trip.

Finally, the ticket consists of at least one and at most sixteen pricing units.

So the morphology is

• Ticket consists of pricing units
• Pricing units consist of fare components
• Fare components consist of flights + a fare

Answer 3

Tariff component (TK) is a segment of a transportation route between points of a route, for estimating the cost of which the OW tariff or half of the tariff RT can be applied (a segment of the route between two successive tariff building points).