Never buy more than 1 airline ticket at a time!

[Buzz's Buddy]

Not exactly true, let me explain.

I've noticed that AirTran and Jet Blue both list "only 2 tickets left at this price" or similar wording. Others may do the same, but these are the ones that I've seen. I needed to book one-way flights for 5 of us, on AirTran, but I forgot to change the passenger total to "5".

When I got to the next screen, it showed an $81 fare, but it also said "Only 3 left at this price". Sure enough, when I went back to the previous screen and selected 5 passengers and tried again, the $81 fare was gone and it showed a fare of $109 for the same flight!

So, I completed the purchase using 2 transactions, the first one using 3 passengers for the $81 fare and the second for the remaining 2 tickets at $109.

Bottom line, I saved myself $114 by first selecting only 1 passenger. If I entered 5 passengers on the first page, I would not have been aware of the cheaper fare.

 

[ancestry]

This is normal practice with most airlines. They only have so many seats at a set price. Once that number of seats is gone then the available seats are sold at a different price level. Basically once demand reaches a certain level then the price goes up.

 

[seashoreCM]

Other idiosyncrasies you may run into: You see "only 3 left" and you select them and when you click the buy button (more correctly, finally get to the buy button) the transaction is rejected because someone else bought one or more of the 3 remaining seats at that price.

You see, unlike a travel agent's computer, your computer cannot claim the seats for the few minutes between clicking "how many people" and "buy".

 

[Horace Horsecollar]

Never buy more than 1 airline ticket at a time!

Yes, there are times when it makes sense to buy airline tickets in multiple transactions. As the OP noted, cheaper tickets might still be available for 1 or 2 passengers, but not for a whole family.

However, I don't agree with the blanket statement, "Never buy more than 1 airline ticket at a time!"

There are disadvantages for a couple or family to be on more than one passenger name record (PNR). When an airline with seat assignments moves passengers to a different flight or different equipment, they'll do their best to keep passengers on the same PNR on the same flight and seated together. But with separate PNRs, passengers could wind up in different parts of the aircraft or even on different flights.

So my advice is to check if a cheaper fare is available for at least one passenger by using multiple transactions -- but know the possible consequences of doing so. Book on a single PNR whenever possible.