u/Even_Ring_9392

I’ve been watching prices for one-way tix from Paris to Chicago for almost two months now. United’s price for ECONOMY seats has stayed above $2k during the whole time. Two days away from the departure date, there are still lots of seats available, yet tix are still almost $2.4k. The same non-stop flight on American is around $1.2k, and on AF/Delta it’s $1.8k. My question is, how/why is United so determined to charge so much more than its competitors for what should be a fairly similar product? I’m perplexed by the consistent price differentials….

Just visited the Colosseum two days ago. Very lucky to have toured BOTH the Underground and the Attic — both were awesome!! After reviewing tons of posts about how to get these tickets and mostly failing to do so via the proscribed methods, here are my insights… which admittedly are based just on my own limited experience and observations while on site.

First, the website/process for trying to score your own Underground or Attic tickets SUCKS. We spent several nights (like midnight to 4-5 am North American time) clicking on various options on the site every 20 minutes when tix were supposed to become available 30 days out, to almost no avail. We followed all the steps, fought the “we think you’re a bot” lockouts, tried slightly different timings (up to a minute before, to a few seconds before, right at, and then every 30 seconds or so for 10 minutes after), and basically nothing worked to get tix.

The sole exception is that ONE TIME an Underground ticket showed as available for a time slot that should have passed maybe 10-20 minutes before. Totally random. I successfully snatched it, but that was literally the only single ticket for Underground or Attic we saw as available on the site during quite a bit of sustained effort and following all the advice and tips we could gather.

Determined, I went on the Underground tour with my ticket and learned something very interesting. First, the workers were kind of incredulous that I actually had a ticket. Various people asked to see it more than once! Why?? Well, what I learned during my time slot and the slots before and after me is that EVERYONE ELSE doing the Underground tour was part of a guided tour. I was literally the only person without a guide I saw my whole time in the Underground — appreciating I wasn’t there that long. The workers barely knew what to do with me since I wasn’t with a guide, because they can’t leave you unaccompanied. So basically I was “escorted” through the Underground by a worker — who was SUPER nice and polite btw! But they didn’t seem like they were expecting any solo visitors, IMO.

My takeaway from this is some combination of (1) the website hardly makes any unguided Underground tickets available at all, and/or (2) the guides/guiding services have some kind of lock on the Underground tickets and have already secured them before they become available to individuals. Look, I could be wrong and my observations might have been timing specific and not indicative of time slots more than 20 minutes on either side of mine, but anyway that’s what I observed.

I had a very different experience with the Attic. After striking out on the Colosseum website multiple nights in a row, we scored those tickets by going through a third-party supplier from China. Paid a little over face value (not the hundreds-of-dollar mark-ups I saw elsewhere). I didn’t think much of it until I did the Attic tour … during which I noticed that almost everyone else doing the Attic was Asian! No knock on Asian people, as I love them (my gf is Asian and she scored these tix via the reseller).

Given our experience trying and failing to get tix, and then seeing the crowd so heavily skewed Asian, I couldn’t help but think that perhaps the reason no tix were available on the website is that certain operators in Asia have built bots or something that manage to grab the tickets before normal people realistically can and they resell them on their sites to mostly Asian people. I don’t know for sure if or how it’s being done, but I do know what I saw, and it’s bizarre to me 95% of the visitors to the Attic would be Asian unless aggregators there are somehow gaming the system to grab tickets for resale.

I will admit that the weekend we were trying for turned out to be super busy (didn’t appreciate at the time that May 1 was a holiday here), so that may have contributed to the scarcity of tickets and some of what I saw. But save for one pure-luck ticket popping up out of maybe a thousand tries, the Colosseum website appears to be nearly useless for tickets to the special places like the Underground and the Attic. (It’s especially ironic that the site’s “anti-bot” features would appear to just keep out normal people working hard to get tickets, while seemingly not preventing aggregators/resellers hardly at all.)

Anyway, sorry for the long post — and for not having more actionable advice — but for folks expending a lot of effort to get these tix, just thought it might be good to for you to know what you’re up against!

Good luck y’all!