Airtran price hike and alternative purchases.

[kstorms27]

I was going to purchase AirTran tickets to Orlando flying out of Grand Rapids, MI but noticed that they raised their price from $120 to $170. Whats up with that?! I checked all the online places and was able to find the price at the $120 mark. My question is, if you buy your tickets off, say Priceline, can you still buy the reserved seating option? We will be traveling with our 3yr old DD and Im not taking any chances of getting split up. Im hesitant to purchase them from any of the online places without knowing this. Also, Im curious why I can get these tickets from Priceline for the $120 price but not direct from AirTran? TIA!

 

[rewok]

The 120$ is probably "cached" by the other online vendors, and not the real "live" price. If you try to go until the "commit to buy" page on these sites, you'll probably get a message like "no more tickets available at that price". You can try it, you won't get charged anything unless there are actually tickets available at that price.

Normally, you should also be able to select seat on 3rd party bookings, but I don't have any experience with Airtran, so I can't confirm.

 

[DebbieB]

I was going to purchase AirTran tickets to Orlando flying out of Grand Rapids, MI but noticed that they raised their price from $120 to $170. Whats up with that?! I checked all the online places and was able to find the price at the $120 mark. My question is, if you buy your tickets off, say Priceline, can you still buy the reserved seating option? We will be traveling with our 3yr old DD and Im not taking any chances of getting split up. Im hesitant to purchase them from any of the online places without knowing this. Also, Im curious why I can get these tickets from Priceline for the $120 price but not direct from AirTran? TIA!

Most likely you will not be able to get that price. I've tried that before with Expedia, when I get to the end it errors and says "fare not available".

 

[Paging Tom Morrow]

Try booking just two seats first and see if you can still get $120 pp for those two. Sometimes the price is still available but not for the whole party so the whole party is given a larger price. If two seats are available for $120 each, you can then likely purchase the third seat at $170. That works out to an average of 136 per person, which isn't too bad.

 

[budbeerlady]

Keep watching Airtran if you are not in a huge hurry to book. They were originally coming in on my date out of GRR at $140, then they dropped to $120 for a couple of days for each way. The price seems to change every week or so. I know the no-stops are much higher for my dates than those flights with layovers.