Sitting here booking a flight. Finding a Lufthansa flight, but it’s apparently much cheaper through the United website. Finding a multi-city flight on Google Flights, but other search engines will find you completely different flights, and completely different prices for those same flights.
How tf do this market, these engines, and this pricing work? Extremely confusing, and seems to have gotten worse over time.
In: 26
There are two parts of airline tickets, rules/fares, and availability.
Airline tickets are sold at different levels. based on advance purchase or flexibility. Typically they have some form of 21, 14, 7 days advance purchase requirement, the closer in to departure the higher prices get. Ticket availability might be something like 10 @ $100, 15 @ $150, 20 @ $200 for example. If the $100 seats sell out the price jumps to $150 even if more than 21-days out. Flight prices can also be higher on weekends, or different times of day.
Airlines also sell codeshares, where you can buy a ticket with a United flight number, but it’s actually operated by Lufthansa. United might have different prices/rules/availability on a route than Lufthansa even if it is the same plane.
Not all fare search engines use ‘live’ availability. They may have the prices, but do not check actual availability until you go to buy the ticket. This is why prices can jump or booking engine says ‘this fare is no longer available’. Using the flight routing rules the prices is correct, but the seats have been sold.
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