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Hello,
This is not a question really unless somebody from the industry can shed some light into what happened here behind the scenes.
During the weekend (last days of June) I was testing some fare from the UK to LAX then NY and back for work. Prices were around £4,500 for all flights with all alliances (Skyteam maybe a tad cheaper). The flight is in more than 3 months (~105 days).
This wouldn’t be HfP if I hadn’t also tried some ex-UK options for fun. Leaving from Madrid or Dublin came up much cheaper at £2,500.
When on Monday afternoon (1st of July) I decided to go ahead and book all OneWorld options were coming at £8,000 to £12,000 (I am fairly certain the prices were still there in the morning).
All of them on routes with a dozen flights available on each route. The MAD and DUB options remained unchanged.
I called our corporate travel company thinking something was wrong or maybe they had a different set of prices. They confirmed those were the prices but also that there was plenty of availability.
Fast forward to Tuesday evening (~5pm) and all prices were back to normal. I had been checking during the day and know for sure that was not the case in the morning.
Any idea of why or what causes these discrepancies in fares? (I believe the “I” class was removed fully and only “R” remained from LHR – the same fare from DUB and MAD was still £2,500!) I have heard and seen prices move intra-week but never thought there would be a thing such as a Monday afternoon to Tuesday afternoon massive hike in prices.
I’ve seen this before on short haul and long haul. I’d just assumed that a group booking had reserved/booked seats removing one or more of the booking classes, then cancelled putting the seats available again.
Either that or big brother is watching you and thinks there’s high demand for the flight after all those searches!
My boss said the same “how many searches you did to cause that!” … but this routes have plenty of planes with lots of capacity. Imagine if I was the cause of a poor should booking his/her ticket for £12,000 yesterday just to see it dive to £4,000 today.
A friend trying to book a NY business trip also said she noticed a huge increase between last Thursday and Monday (only on BA/OneWOrld).
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