I'm looking at flights for our September trip and I would save $250 if I booked using CheapTickets vs directly with the airline.
Chances are good that what you see on CheapTickets is phantom availability. Have you tried selecting the seats and going through the booking process. By the time you reach the screen to enter your payment, you may get a "opps...the price has changed" notice.
For general consumers, there are two different types of airfare: retail and wholesale. Retail fares are what everyone sees when visiting an airline website or an Online
Travel Agency (OTA) like CheapTickets. Retail fares are the same not matter where they are purchased. All sources will be pulling those fares from the same data source.
Wholesale fares are specially negotiated prices set up between an airline and a specific company. Wholesale fares are fairly rare. Typically, the only way to book them online is to purchase them as a package. (Note: A package isn't the same thing as a "bundle" of products like airfare plus hotel that some OTAs push.)
As far as I know CheapTickets does not offer any wholesale fares on airline tickets.
What's phantom availability? Every time you search for tickets, whatever website you visit theoretically contacts the airline to get prices. Despite all of that happening in cyberspace, it isn't necessarily free. The busier the site, the bigger the web server running that site needs to be. So, OTAs tend to limit transactions when it makes sense.
For example, any date way in the future is less likely to have price changes. Thus, the OTA might not query the actual ticket price each and every time you search. Instead, they will store the price from the first search and only update it when someone tries to purchase or when the pre-determined time frame runs out.
I appreciate all the warnings but I'm not looking for warnings unless it's people who have booked with CheapTickets lately and have personal experiences to share.
While you are free to ignore warnings, it's probably worth asking yourself why multiple people are telling you to beware.
I spent several decades working in and following the travel industry. While I'm not quite to the point of needing to be paid to use them like
AngiTN, it would take a lot for me to purposely a layer of complexity in my travel arrangements. That's essentially what you do when you purchase airline tickets from an OTA.
As noted, if you have a problem outside of your travel day, you can't call the airline. Instead, you'll call the OTA, who will call the airline. In that scenario, you are at the mercy of the competence of the person at the CheapTickets call center. While I'm certain some are great, you can't control which agent you will get.
