81–90 of 127 posts
No. I work for an OTA (not Kayak). First of all airlines file their fare rules and OTAs don't change the prices, and generally airlines pay around $10 to us to book a RT fare so there is little room to discount. Kayak is a meta which means all they do is present prices they are given from their partners (either via a feed or scrape) and then send them to the partner who shares the fee. Southwest (as others have menti…
Looks like the cheap flights were on WN (Southwest) and the expensive flights were on DL (Delta). I just did an example flight search to fly later this week (Jan 24-30 round trip) from SLC to OAK, a route that both DL and WN fly direct. Kayak shows me fares from $492 on US and B6 changing planes in Phoenix or Long Beach (doubling distance and quintupling flight time) and direct flights from $532 on DL. Kayak doesn't…
Who is "B6"? Can you just spell out the airline name instead?
IATA designators for commonly-discussed US-based airlines:
* AirTrain: FL
* Alaska: AS
* Allegiant: G4
* American: AA
* Delta: DL
* Frontier: F9
* Hawaiian: HA
* JetBlue: B6
* Southwest: WN
* Spirit: NK
* Sun Country: SY
* United: UA
* US Airways: US
* Virgin America: VX
I've often hacked Kayak by booking flights to other destinations with a stopover at the place I want to go. It's bizarre, but yes, they're sometimes cheaper. "opaque and manipulative" indeed.
I have a similarly bizarre little story that's sort of the opposite: I recently added a leg to a trip and cut my fare. Just before the holidays, I was trying to get a flight from LAX to SLC. I tend to fly Southwest, but was finding the fares higher than usual -- generally I can get something in the $250-$300 range, I was seeing $350ish. I was offered a ride to Sacramento, so I checked SAC -> SLC and found I could pur…
Suppose there are three cities: City A, City B and City C. And for simplicity's sake, suppose that City B is the hub for the airline.
Let's say B and C are major business destinations with a lot of business traffic between them. Business travelers are less price-sensitive since they're not personally paying the fare (they just have to stay within corporate travel rules), and more concerned with things like flight length and schedule.
But City A, on the other hand, isn't really a major business destination. People who want to go from City A to other cities are likely on personal/tourist travel, and those passengers do one and only one thing: punch the origin and destination cities into a travel-search engine, and pick the cheapest ticket. All other considerations are null.
Now, suppose that you are the airline employee in charge of maximizing revenue. Getting money out of the B -> C route is easy -- you just need to know a bit about corporate travel policies. If most companies auto-approve any ticket under $500, for example, you could set the fare at $499 and, so long as the flight is short and at a good time of day, you'll get business travelers paying it.
But what about pricing for trips out of City A? They need to connect at your hub in City B, but again you have to remember that price is the only consideration that matters to those passengers. So you set the fares out of City A as low as you can manage while still being profitable (and it may even turn out that B -> C has to subsidize the routes out of A a bit).
The result is, often, that A -> B -> C is cheaper than B -> C.
Similarly, for some city pairs, A -> B -> C will be cheaper than A -> B, which creates an incentive to buy the A -> B -> C ticket, not check a bag, and then just walk out of the airport in City B. This is "hidden city" ticketing (because it's "hiding" the fact that your real destination is the connection point), and airlines will usually penalize (through revocation of frequent-flyer accounts, etc.) passengers who do this.
there is working a trick for long distance flights. I used it a few times to get cheaper tickets: when you are buying long distance flight tickets, pick a city close to where you will depart (this will add an additional flight transferring from your departure city). When you get multiple transfers there is a possibility that the offered price will be cheaper (I confirmed this with an agency when I initially figured t…
No. I work for an OTA (not Kayak). First of all airlines file their fare rules and OTAs don't change the prices, and generally airlines pay around $10 to us to book a RT fare so there is little room to discount. Kayak is a meta which means all they do is present prices they are given from their partners (either via a feed or scrape) and then send them to the partner who shares the fee. Southwest (as others have menti…
If I open an incognito window and hit it again, why does the price change?
It's quite possible that nothing nefarious is going on.
Like someone else said, it’s because it’s a Southwest flight… Southwest isn't shown on the results of the big airfare search engines (kayak, expedia, orbitz) when searching from the United States because it refuses to pay those websites' fees. Looks like you’ve found out that they are shown on Canada based version of the Kayak site. Most likely because the fee arrangements are different or because Southwest is willin…
You can get the same effect with other GDS products also, try rental cars for one. The other crazy thing is that different geographic markets are generally responsible for their own revenues, so you can have different promotions, and yield management strategies depending on who is trying to hit their numbers.