Always search for just ONE seat!
Airlines (and train companies, including Eurostar) allocate a certain number of seats to be sold at various prices.
They don’t want to fill an aircraft with £9.99 fare-paying passengers!
So they’ll allocate for example:
10 seats at £9.99
30 seats at £39.00
50 seats at £150.00
50 seats at £200.00
If 9 seats have been sold at £9.99 there will be just one seat left at that price and the next seat to be sold will be at £39.00
However, if you request two seats, the airline reservation systems will not offer you that “last seat” price, but will sell you two at the next higher price, even though that lower priced ticket remains available for sale.
By requesting and booking one seat at a time, you can achieve one fare at the lower price and one at the higher price.
Having spent 20 years selling air tickets in a travel agency, I know that this scenario occurs more frequently than you would imagine!
I recently saved £150 by booking separate tickets on a trip for two to Dubai by booking individual seats. One seat left was priced at £250 and the next one was £400
Make sure that enough seats are available on the aircraft though, by checking for the total party first!
OPODO show the actual number of seats available at the price quoted, click HERE
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 31st, 2011 at 10:24 am and is filed under Booking Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
