How to buy low cost airline tickets while airlines are offering big reductions

10/12/2016 4:29:34 PM

Airlines typically operate separate systems for fare searches and bookings/reservations. The reservations engine or GDS may be a legacy system that still runs on a mainframe! But fare searching is quite an intensive operation, so in order to perform fare searches quickly and at scale, all of the reservations information is mirrored on a much faster, modern system, together with the fares and other data. Unfortunately this means that sometimes the indicative fares returned by a flight search are for fare classes without availability. Where this is the case, there should be advice on the website informing you that “all fares subject to availability” or similar.

One tip that may work with certain airlines: If you are booking multiple seats on a single flight, they will search for the cheapest fare class with the required availability, so if there is only one seat left at the low price, you won’t see it… unless you search for a single passenger flight. This is rare but can happen.

10/11/2016 9:08:42 AM

Big sales draw lots of buyers for only a few seats. Many “sales” by airlines have limited availability, often just a few seats on each applicable flight. Lots of people head for the website and those seats are gobbled up quickly.

The trick is to be first in line 😉

Some airlines announce sales ahead of time to their frequent flyers. Some announce it via their email newsletter. Some announce it the moment the sale starts. If you find out about these sales second hand from a friend or social media or the news channel, you are too late.

Credit:stackoverflow.com‘

About me

Hello,My name is Aparna Patel,I’m a Travel Blogger and Photographer who travel the world full-time with my hubby.I like to share my travel experience.

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