What the bleeping f*?%@ hell is this s?%@t?

Those are more less my exact words when this happened:

Back in 06 I booked a vacation in Orlando through Expedia. It included plane tickets, hotel, rental car, and park tickets. Ihad no problems at all with any aspect of the trip, and I thought I got a fair price. So naturally in 08 when I first went to Las Vegas, I also booked on Epxeida.

Or rather I tried to. I'd planned the Sahara for 4 nights, plus plane tickets, shuttle round trip to/from the airport and a Hoover Dam tour. The site quoted an amount of about $700 (this isn't exact, but it's close), which I thought was a fair price.

All well and good. But when I went to the payment page a notice appeared warning of a price change in the airfare, so now the package came to $950 (again, not exact but close). I reset everything, began agains fromscratch (same options), again got a quote of $700, and again at payment it climbed to $950.

I then checked the airline's website (Mexicana), thinking maybe it had unexpectedly raised prices. But the price on the airline's site was what Expedia quoted before payment.

In the end I booked the hotel, shuttle and tour through Expedia and the ticket directly through Mexicana.

What bothers me is I never found out why the airfare jumped upwards when trying to pay. I wrote to Expedia, but their answer was meaningless (literally meaningless). This year I got great quotes on Expedia, inlcuding a 5 night stay at Mandalay Bay plus airfare and shuttle for only $950. But I dind't trust the price not to go up at payment, so I dind't even try to pay for it.

In the end I got a good deal by booking through Mexicana and Harrah's (about $650 added airfare and 6 nights at the Rio). It isn't as good as Mandalay Bay, but at $300 less, it's great.

(edited a minor typo)

Don't know what to say to this, except that sometimes Expedia can be a p in the a, and sometimes it can be great.

Case in point: Three months ago I bought a package to Freeport, Bahamas including direct flights on American (cxn in Miami) and four nights in a nice-ish hotel for $113, including tax. This was an Expedia "glitch." They never changed the payment, and confirmed my reservation.

I ended up not going (too much work), but just goes to show you you can sometimes find amazing deals on Expedia.

I think that has happened to me before, at Travelocity. However, in booking many flights there, I think it happened only once. I think there is sometimes a disconnect between the prices as originally quoted, and the actual booking. When an airline changes the price of a flight, I think the quote page is a little slow to incorporate that information. Of course, this is way out of my area, so someone correct me if I'm wrong.

Quote: Wizard

I think there is sometimes a disconnect between the prices as originally quoted, and the actual booking. When an airline changes the price of a flight, I think the quote page is a little slow to incorporate that information. Of course, this is way out of my area, so someone correct me if I'm wrong.

It's out of my area, too.

But I thought just that at the time. After I'd booked the trip as described in the opening post, I tried the whole Expedia thing again just to see what would happen. This was about six days after I'd given up on it. The exact same thing happened.

Now, one thing I also considered is the peculiar way some Mexican airlines have for quoting prices on their sites. Airfare is a great deal mreo complicated than what the airline charges for a ticket. There are taxes, airport fees, air control fees, in some cases foreign exchange fees, sometimes fuel fees, etc. When you go to, say mexicana's website, the rountrip fare Mex-Las is quoted at, say, $300 to $500 depending on the exact day and flight and fare type you choose. Ok, next you choose among the alternatives and all taxes and fees are added. The price jumps from $300 to $390.

In some sites it's worse. The low cost airlines can double in price once they add fees and taxes (still lwoer thant he big carriers, but more disappointing even so).

But when I said the price at Mexicana's site was the same, I mean after adding taxes and fees.

I figure it had something to do with how much Expedia pays either the airline or an intemediary in order to book flights on that airline. But thta's just an educated guess.

There is another possibility-there is no relation between Expedia's fares and the airline fares. Expedia has already bought, at wholesale prices, a volume of airline seats, not seats on a particular flight, but on all flights of the airline. I believe this is how the cruise lines handle their air arrangements.

I do know that this is what I was told they do for hotels. I made a reservation for three days at Terrible's through Expedia,--I know what you are thinking, but I got a deal. When I checked in I had to sign a form and give them a credit card to imprint to pay for anything I charged at the hotel. After reading the form, I commented that the room rate was not on the form and it bothered me that I was required to agree to charges but the room rate was not stated. The clerk said that my reservation was prepaid through Expedia and even Terrible's did not know what the room rate was because it was sold by Expedia. Expedia had bought a block of rooms at wholesale and therefore Terrible's had nothing to do with what rate I was charged.

I travel a lot for work, and I fly almost exclusively on United. I book through united.com almost always (probably about 90% of flights on United, and 90% of those trips booked directly through their website, so 81% of all travel booked through united.com). I've noticed what I think is a similar glitch on their website.

When I'm booking a flight with a shorter lead time, I'll get a note in the website that says "hurry, only 1 ticket left at this price." Every once in a while (maybe 6-8 times total in the 5 years that I've been doing this) the price is higher when I get to the payment page. When I go back out, the original message about the remaining tickets remains. I actually got a reasonable response from United about the situation. Apparently, the payment page pulls from an actual count of available tickets and is updated in real time. So, if my 1 ticket sold at that price before I could finish the process, then I'd get the next best price. The outer pages of the website are updated on a short delay, which the United tech dude said was about 15 minutes. I bet similar things happen with other travel sites. (probably other similar sites as well)

I used to work at a large internet travel company back in the days that you mentioned and knew how pricing worked for these companies.

rdw4potus's response is essentially correct.

When you get the original price from Expedia, that price for airfare comes from one of the two major ticket databases (one is Worldspan), but that information is dated. Back three or four years, likely, that trip to the server to get prices probably happened a few times per day. Today, Expedia likely updated their technology to either grab the latest price that someone else actually paid for the ticket or it takes much more frequent trips to the server to get the price (more likely). Competition between the major sites (Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz) would have driven this technology, as well as the promise by the actual carriers of their low price guarantee. Since Expedia.com caters to the US market, it might be likely that trips to grab prices for foreign carriers happen much less, or you could have simply run into a software bug due to caching or some other issue.

As rdw4potus states, the payment page gives the actual price based on the airline's price.

Airline tickets sold on major travel sites (Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity) are not discounted or sold to the web sites unlike hotels.

To expand on BoyMimbo's answer, yeah, the info is old.

If you read the fine print, it probably indicates the price may change when you get to the payment page.

It doesn't always change, but it might.

But the thing is, when you go back to see the price comparison page, the system reverts to the old data for a very good reason: ALL of the data is old, but it all is at least accurate to the same time period. To have one new price in that comparison page would be misleading.


And ALL of the third-party booking systems do this.

Quote: boymimbo

When you get the original price from Expedia, that price for airfare comes from one of the two major ticket databases (one is Worldspan), but that information is dated. Back three or four years, likely, that trip to the server to get prices probably happened a few times per day. Today, Expedia likely updated their technology to either grab the latest price that someone else actually paid for the ticket or it takes much more frequent trips to the server to get the price (more likely).

Thank you. That makes sense.

BTW The words I did not use earlier were "bait and switch." But that's exactly what it felt like, the worse because the swing was so extreme.

In 06 when I booked Orlando there were some changes upon final payment, but amounting to no more than a few bucks. If you lose $16 out of about a thousand, that's just a rounding error.

I've tried other travel sites, but the pricing diferences aren't very large, and Expedia works better with my way of browsing. Orbitz crams too much info on one page, for example. I've also tried regional and Mexican sites, for airlines, hotels and travel agencies. Thus far the travel agencies are terrible. The leading one, Despegar.com, tends to grab airline travel apckages with a mark up <sigh>. And the Hispanic version of Expedia doesn't handle flights at all!

I'll probably give Expedia a second chance next time (too late for this trip). More so if I go somewhere other than Vegas in 2011 (suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure!)

I had a related problem just yesterday when trying to book a flight to Orlando. I kept getting quoted the same price on all the sites (Orbitz, Travelociy, Expedia, etc...) but when I tried to actually book the flight it either 1) jacked the price up or 2) said the flight wasn't available.

But get this, if I booked the SAME EXACT flights on 2 one-way reservations, it went through, and for the same price as the originally quoted round trip price. How does that happen?

Other than that time in Expedia I've never had any other sort of fare conflict on an airline, and I do book tickets on airline sites a few times a year for business.

One time, though, I booked a same day round trip flight Mex City to Guadalajara on Aeromexico. As usual I picked my seats online. The outbound flight was on the usual B-737. The return flight was on an Embraer jet similar to the 737, but with a diferent seat layout. I always pick window seats.

Well, on seeing the plane for the return flight it was another B-737, and my seat was on the aisle rather thant he window. I can live with an aisle seat, but not on a middle seat <shudder>. The question is why the plane wasn't the same the flight schedule and ticket said it was.