Booking Flights Part 2

July 14th, 2011 by Flight Centre StaffIn Part One of his series, Joel Pennington walked us through the things we can and cannot control when booking a flight and explained how different classes affect different pricing. Now that we understand how flight pricing works, today Joel takes look at the many ways in which this can affect your booking and why using an agent can save you time and stress down the road:

First thing’s first: an airline will put enough seats in the lowest class and make the ticket non-refundable to cover the cost of the flight. For example, there are 40 seats in V class and they are all non-refundable so therefore the money made from those 40 seats covers the airlines costs, and everything else now is profit so they can have tickets that vary in terms of restrictions and change fee’s (I am trying to simplify this for now, as airlines can make it much more complicated but this is generally how it works).
Something websites have done to get people to book online, is simplify this system to the point of making it near impossible to know what exactly you’re purchasing. You just pick dates, destination and it will display flights starting at the absolute cheapest regardless of restrictions/times you want to fly/airlines/booking class. Every single client that has walked in or spoke to me regarding a flight they have found online I have found something else that is far more appealing to them whether it be price or logistics. For example I had a friend email me a flight he was happy with and said he just thought he would email so I would book it for him to help me out. The flight had two changes in awful airports and left at 6am (leaving Guelph at 3am to get to Toronto). I found him a flight for an extra $25 per person that had one change and left at 11am.
Another problem with websites not displaying booking classes is that if you have searched for a flight with two passengers and there is one seat available in V class for $250 and then the next level up is T class for $325, the website will give you two seats in T class. We as travel agents use a completely different system which displays booking classes so that I can book one in V class and the other in T class and save you $75!
So that is two examples of using booking classes to your advantage. Next week, we will look at some other options including seasonality and charter flights.

Courtesy of: Joel Pennington, International Travel Consultant, Flight Centre Canada.