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From: mrtravel on 25 Oct 2007 00:38 Justin Case wrote: > Hatunen <hatunen(a)cox.net> wrote in > news:0davh390subf1u15oclsp1j4b9qkn3puue(a)4ax.com: > > >>BTW, what's the $300? Is it fees and taxes or an actual fare >>change? >> > > Probably the TSA surcharge. > > Swiss Army kmife surcharge
From: TEP on 25 Oct 2007 08:54 This happens because the search is not performed with up-to-date real-time data. It has been reported that it happens most frequently on Orbitz. It is called "fare jumping".
From: Newbie on 25 Oct 2007 11:52 bertbarndoor <bertbarndoor(a)gmail.com> wrote: : What the hell, you do a search, you get the price, you click on it, : and then it goes up $300. How annoying is this? What a waste of time. Yes it is frustrating, but travelocity is a global company, not your neighborhood desk, and it is entirely possible that someone could have bought those cheaper seats in the meantime.
From: DevilsPGD on 25 Oct 2007 16:03 In message <251020071052374832%newbie(a)no.spam> Newbie <newbie(a)no.spam> wrote: >bertbarndoor <bertbarndoor(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >: What the hell, you do a search, you get the price, you click on it, >: and then it goes up $300. How annoying is this? What a waste of time. > >Yes it is frustrating, but travelocity is a global company, not your >neighborhood desk, and it is entirely possible that someone could have >bought those cheaper seats in the meantime. I've also seen it on routes where I am fairly certain that no one else was buying -- I tend to book flights at 3 or 4 in the morning, and if you use the "flexible dates" feature you can sometimes see searches that were performed recently. If there is no fare on a date, go do the search manually then go back to the flexible dates and notice that the price now appears. I've had cases where there was no other details on a given date until I did a query for that specific date, then attempted to make a purchase and gotten the "lowest price has changed", then seen the lowest price back again a few hours later. Again, attempting to buy shows that it has changed. Personally, I think they're showing prices they know likely won't go through just to keep eyeballs on their site. -- You can get more with a kind word and a 2x4 than just a kind word.
From: Nobody on 25 Oct 2007 16:31
DevilsPGD wrote: > Personally, I think they're showing prices they know likely won't go > through just to keep eyeballs on their site. This goes all the way back to EaasySabre. They display published fares received in batch from airlines. Only once you book do they try to confirm availability and then tell you that there are no available seats left. It is a fact of life for mass market systems with large volumes of queries that will never yield a booking. Real travel agents can interrogate available fares on a route on a date before starting booking process. The dumbed down web based travel agencies don't do that since it would cost them way too much to have live inventory queries from many many airlines everytime some user wanted an idea of fares between A and B. And it gets worse when they have those "my dates are flexible" since the web based software will then show you any/all fares published on that route in roughly the same time period even though even the batch updates may show all seats usable for a fare being sold out on the date you want. Once you understand how these systems work, then you understand why they come to you at the last minute with a "sorry that fare isn't available". |