Price of 1 compared to 2 tickets

So the airplane (ac) is empty as this booking isn't until July. Why would one ticket be $1119 but two tickets be $1292 each? If I booked two singles, it would save me $170 x1 or maybe even $170x2 dependent on the following booking price of course.

First off....unless you have "tools", you don't know the plane is empty.

 

Tickets are in inventory "buckets", with different fares (which is a distinct term of art that is not the same as "price"). The airline yield management systems allocates inventory into the various buckets. If a customer tries to purchase more tickets than there are in a bucket, the system automatically bumps them up to the bucket that has the desired number of seats. It will NOT pull one from the lower bucket and one from the higher.

 

Yes, you would get different prices. You would also get different "fares", which encompasses both the price AND the specific fare rules that would go with that ticket. However, if the system is bumping you to a higher bucket when you try to buy 2 tickets, that doesn't mean that you can buy one and then buy a second at the lower price. Inventory may or may not be replenished into buckets after they sell out, all depending on yield management algorithms.

 

Of course, with actual city, date, time and flight information, I could have looked it up. But general questions = general answers.

So the airplane (ac) is empty as this booking isn't until July. Why would one ticket be $1119 but two tickets be $1292 each? If I booked two singles, it would save me $170 x1 or maybe even $170x2 dependent on the following booking price of course.

 

I started a thread on this topic not too long ago.

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=2077632

 

hopefully the link will work so I will not have to repeat the discussion. what I learned is that the pricing seems to be very "fluid". I eventually booked my Feb 2015 tickets to Miami on two different, affiliate, airlines for the exact same flights. A few days after I booked the ticket on AA and the other on US Airways, the AA site was showing that I could have bought 2 tickets at the same time for the lower price. One week later, AA was showing the tickets for $200 more pp.

 

When I picked my seat selection, the seats were only about 15% full, even though the booking sites were saying only 2 seats left. I now know that refers to the fare "bucket" and not the whole plane.

 

So, I guess you need to be patient, and keep checking to hopefully get the flights you want for the lower price. Or risk only finding the higher price. good luck.

Thanks.

 

I googled it after I posted and found an interesting article too. This fellow has two browsers open and puts in singles, then clicks payment at same time and usually can get the single rate for both tickets, lol...

I googled it after I posted and found an interesting article too. This fellow has two browsers open and puts in singles, then clicks payment at same time and usually can get the single rate for both tickets, lol...

You'll see that this too was discussed in that earlier thread. I remain sceptical. There are many things one reads on the internet about how to do X or Y when travelling, which I know from repeated and frequent experience are simply not true. (Dress nicely to get an upgrade, for example, which is still peddled by some even today.)

When I picked my seat selection, the seats were only about 15% full, even though the booking sites were saying only 2 seats left. I now know that refers to the fare "bucket" and not the whole plane.

 

As others have said - you really don't know. When we booked a group fare for 12 of us I was allowed to pick where we wanted to sit. I put couples and families together and "some" of them showed up on the website as taken and some did not. I called and confirmed that yes those were all our seats. Funny - they didn't "seat" the 4 kids in our group. Their seats showed as available right up to the end.