Ticket price anomolies

[sitdown]

Recently I booked a return flight with VB PER BME. Didn't take a lot of notice of the code sharing symbols when booking, thinking VB were making both flights. Surprised to see the return flight was with XR when emailed the confirmation. From curiosity I looked at the same flight with XR direct and astounded to see price was half of the VB charge and to rub in the salt XR do not have luggage charges. Emailed VB saying not happy at all. Answer was "we bulk buy from XR and the charge represents what XR charge us". As if. I replied and said advertise for a new commercial manager. Anyone else experienced similar

 

[anat0l]

It's not unusual for codeshared flights not to agree in price depending on who you purchase them from.

In some cases, you may not even get the same range of seats from one airline compared to the other (in this case, usually the airline operating the flight will offer a better range than that of its codeshare partners). In other cases, who you buy the fare from can affect particular aspects of service related to the fare (for example, how much baggage you can carry, how many FF points you receive, eligibility for upgrades, etc.)

Sometimes, the price can also be affected by the inventory given to each codeshare partner. In this case, although it would be the "only" explanation, perhaps of the seats which Virgin Blue set aside from XR as their seats to be sold on XR's behalf, the cheapest of these seats have already sold out. XR may have more seats in the cheapest fare bucket available, but Virgin Blue could only further sell the remainder of their codeshared seats which are in the higher fare bucket.

Again, that's a contrived reason, but it's the only one I can think of. Bottom line is with codeshares (and between alliance partners) it pays to check each partner (and the operating airline) to check for discrepancies. You might still buy the more expensive fare, but there would obviously be a reason for that.

 

[oz_mark]

It is not unusual to see this happen (just ask anyone who has booked some of the QF codesharees!). Each of the marketing carriers sets their prices independently of the others (can't have collusion now, can we?), subject to their own yield management processes.

It's unfortunate, but it does happen.

 

[docjames]

There is also a posibility of pricing change (btoh airlines) between when you booked and when you looked again.

 

[sitdown]

Thanks for the responses. I must comment tho' that when booking hotels it is becoming universal for the hotel direct booking site to guarantee "best price available". it might be a good idea for the airlines to adopt a similar policy when offloading passengers onto code share partners