Shady Airtran

[kaytieeldr]

While shady may be a strong word to use, I'd say it applies here. To offer one price online, and then increase that price based on the number of times I've clicked on the site in the form of a 'cookie', seems shady to me.

I know dioxide already answered this, but it can't be said too much: cookies had NOTHING to do with the fare increase.

WHILE you were in the process of purchasing your four tickets at $X each, another party was at least a step ahead of you in purchasing one or more of those same four tickets at that same $X each.

They completed their transaction first. This left between zero and three tickets at $X remaining for you.

Because you were purchasing FOUR tickets in a SINGLE transaction, ALL your tickets were thus priced at the NEXT HIGHEST fare bucket, or $X+$Y each.

Had you stopped, and instead purchased EACH ticket SEPARATELY, one or more of those individual purchases would have been at $X each - assuming of course, that yet another passenger didn't come along in the meantime and purchase any/all the remaining $X tickets while you were doing this. Then you could have purchased any tickets no longer priced at $X, at $X+$Y - instead of spending $X+$Y on each of the four.

 

[Zdog]

I appreciate the feedback on this issue. An update: when I went back in last night and repeated the process, it looked to me as if no new seats had been sold from when I tried to buy a few nights ago, got the error message, then the higher price. It's now back down to the lower price. So, if I were to purchase each seat individually, I may get one, two, or three for the lower price?

Bottom line is, I'm not flush with cash, but I may end up just spending the extra 100 on Jetblue for convenience of a direct flight, at our home airport. My kids are egging me on to do just this, since they want seatback TV.

 

[klynn]

I tried to book tickets for my families Sept vacation this afternoon. I had some coupon codes that I tried and it did take. Now mind you I evidently just paid attention to the book by date and did not look at the fly by date so it is paritially my fault. But I had everything entered in to the point that I had entered my credit card info and pushed the button to complete the sale. It was not until that it went to process my credit card that it came up with an error stating that their payment system was having issues and that I needed to call them. Nothing was mentioned at all about the coupons not being valid for the dates of my travel.

I proceeded to call them was on hold for several minutes before I was able to talk to someone and was told that my dates of travel must be out of the range for my coupons. I was told that I just needed to remove the coupons and resubmit. Well as many of you know once you push the button to buy it does not let you go back and edit you gotta go through the whole process again. There booking system should have never let me get to the point of purchasing if the coupons were not valid. Any other site that I have used on the internet has always come up with an invalid coupon error and stopped you from getting to the poing of entering in cc info and pushing the button to make the purchase.

I asked her to verify that it did not go through and was told that she did not think so but if I wanted to be sure I should just wait 24 hours and try again. But she told me you should be ok to purchase them again and if the other charge goes through give us a call and we can reverse the charges. I can just imanigine what a pain that would be.

I asked if there were any valid coupons for my travel time and she just said I would need to read through the partners page. Not very helpful at all, personally I think if you have someone ready to hand over the money to make the purchase and to be honest it was only 40 dollars but it is the principal of the thing in my mind you would do something to complete the sale. I am going to be upset if I wait my 24 hours and they raise the fare on me. I have never flown Airtran so my experience so far is not voting well in there favor.

This same exact thing just happend to me a few nights ago. I was trying to book a reservation for 3 people and using 3 $10. coupons. It appeared that is was accepting my coupons but I could never complete the transaction due to the same error message. It turns out that one of my coupons was past expiration. Then I just used a different coupon that I had with a current expiration and booked the reservation without any problembs. Check the date on the bottom of your coupons to make sure they are still valid.

 

[ruadisneyfan2]

Perhaps when you were looking at fares to 'just check' you were only entering 1 passenger? This is how SWA works also. Let's say we're a family of 4 and there are 3 seats left at the lower fare. If I enter 1 person, it offers the cheaper fare. If I enter 4, it can't still offer the lower fare so it bumps all 4 of us to the higher fare.
To get around this, I check prices with 1 passenger, then with 4 to see if there's a difference. If there is a difference, I then check with 3 passengers, then 2, etc.

This way I'll discover that I can buy 3 at the cheaper price, then buy the 4th one only at the higher price.

 

[Halle]

I appreciate the feedback on this issue. An update: when I went back in last night and repeated the process, it looked to me as if no new seats had been sold from when I tried to buy a few nights ago, got the error message, then the higher price. It's now back down to the lower price. So, if I were to purchase each seat individually, I may get one, two, or three for the lower price?

Bottom line is, I'm not flush with cash, but I may end up just spending the extra 100 on Jetblue for convenience of a direct flight, at our home airport. My kids are egging me on to do just this, since they want seatback TV.

Don't purchase each seat individually. I have been burned on two differnet airlines(AT) was one of them when we purchased tickets at a later date for one of our kids. Delayed flights out of Rochester NY and we couldn't make our connection. DS was put on a different flight than us.
Jet Blue is far superior to AT.

 

[danielle.st]

While shady may be a strong word to use, I'd say it applies here. To offer one price online, and then increase that price based on the number of times I've clicked on the site in the form of a 'cookie', seems shady to me. Again, I'm sure there are many people who've used Airtran and loved the flight, the service, and the price. But my trust level went down, when the price of the flight went up (and then down again, after I deleted my cookies.

That doesn't happen (the cookie thing) IMO. I check Airtran prices daily, for months before and after booking a trip. There are price fluctuations dependent more on days of the week. They don't go up depending on how many times I click though.