Hello and welcome to my web site that explains how airlines work with online travel web sites. This web site is one of a series of web sites that sets out to explain what goes on behind the scenes on a travel web site. If you missed the first in the series I invite you to click here and you will be taken there right away.
Okay, so lets get started. When I wrote this blog I thought how do I help my reader to understand all this stuff and clear up some concerns. I decided the easiest way is to make it like a question and answer as opposed to all business process based that you are not really interested in anyways. But a little bit of knowledge is good.
All airlines, like any other business follows the law of supply and demand. For really popular destinations (also known as City Pairs) airlines will offer multiple flights per day at different times. A good example would be Chicago to new York. Offered by multiple airlines at multiple times and different prices. We'll talk about that later.
"How does an airline set the price of a seat?"
An airline knows exactly how much it costs to fly a plane from point A to point B and they set the base price accordingly, for business class and first class they charge a premium. Once the prices have been set the airline publishes their fares to a Global Distribution System (GDS), the largest in North America is Sabre. Sabre then makes this information available to web search and booking engines.
"What are seat sales?"
A seat sale is the airlines incentive to you to book that particular flight, it may be at a time of day that is not too popular for travel or it may be a particular day of the week, such as Tuesday or Thursday.
"Why is the price different for one time of day, compared to another time of day?"
Early morning flights sell quickly to mostly business travelers so the airline will charge a premium for these flights. The later flights are not so popular so the airline will charge less for those flights.
"I was just looking at a flight to book and then when I tried to book it the web site said no longer available...what happened?"
Each travel web site has a search engine that searches a GDS for flight availability. Typically, if there are more than two seats available the flight is shown for selection. However, remember you are not the only one that may be looking for that flight and someone may have been booking the seats when your search found the flight. A GDS will not reserve or close a seat until the full payment has been made. So while payment was being processed the seats are still shown as available.
"When I searched this flight the price was $X, when I went to book it the price had changed to $Y and the total taxes payable had changed by $15.47.....WHY?"
Airlines frequently adjust the seat prices on a flight, especially after they have sold 80% of the seats. The GDS posts these changes to the airlines information frequently throughout the day. The price of the seat is not firm until the booking commitment is made. Let us now deal with the taxes and "Q" fees. A GDS charges for every search made of its database so in order to keep costs down most search engines keep the aggregate cost of taxes and additional fees within their own computer system and siplay the amount as approximate. When the booking commitment is made the search engine will collect all the additional fees to be applied to the cost of the fare, this is always different than what was displayed originally.
Custom Search
I hope this helps you to understand more of what goes on behind the scenes and how these online travel sites work. Please comment if you enjoyed this site.
Soon to follow will be information about:
Cruise lines
Cars
Hotels
Package Vacations
Rewards Programs.
Comment on what you would like to see first.
