watching airfare

[bbrnca]

I have been watching Southwest flights from Orlando to Buffalo for our return flight in July and i tried playing around with the passanger totals in our party (6) and keep coming up with differnet prices for the cheapest airfare.... I even opened up 6 different windows and they all came in at 89.00 but put in 6 and they are 109.00 per person.... any idea as to why this is ???? It's not like they are sold out of the "wanna get away" price range.... but is it just airlines getting greedy ????

 

[jheigl]

I also always look for Buffalo to Orlando! The only thing I can think of is that there are a number of seats at that price range that is lower than the total people you have flying (for example, they may have 5 at the cheap price, and you are flying with 6). When you are looking for tickets, they do not reserve them for you for a couple minutes, unlike places like ticketmaster or whatever. I have had many times where I went to book a cheap fare that I saw and by the time I hit purchase, I got a message back saying the fare was sold out and had to go through the process again. So, by opening six windows, that doesn't really mean anything...at least from what I understand about the way airfare is booked. This is all my opinion on what is happening, but not sure. You can always call a Southwest rep.

 

[CarolA]

NO, the flaw with your logic is that while you have SIX windows open you aren't really buying six tickets. SW is probably not looking and seeing "opps" we have five other folks browsing that same ticket price at the same time. I bet that if you started buying ONE at a time at some point one of the goes "opps" you can only get the $109 fare.

 

[Joan S.]

Hi SWA seems to release a certain number of lower priced tickets at a time. So you could get your 5 tickets at the $89. And the 6th ticket at 109. Or you could wait a couple of days and see if SWA releases more tickets for that same flight at 89. I know this happens because once I purchase tickets I check daily to see if SWA has lowered their prices and there are times when I can get a credit for 1 or 2 lowered fares but not on all four tickets I have bought. Because we fly more than once a year I am always willing to take a price reduction as a SWA credit. I just purchased my SWA tickets for July 7-19. I was able to purchase the flights down(7/7) at 79.each. And 2 out of 4 of the flight home(7/19) at 99. The price then jumped to 119.for the same flight home. But since I had 2 Rapid Rewards I got he other 2 of us on the same flight using my rewards. So I ended up spending $358.40 for FOUR one way tickets,$219.20 for TWO one way tickets and $5.00 to use 2 Rapid rewards. I will keep checking especially my flights home to see if prices are reduced at all. I have been watching the SWA ticket prices for the past 2 weeks and felt that these fares were good enough to purchase because I wanted nonstop early am flights out of PVD. And evening nonstop flights out of MCO. Joan