Scratj Undercover: Airline Ticket Sites
Expedia.com
It’s well known that being at the “right place at the right time” when buying your airline tickets has a great deal to do with the cost outcome, and because of this, many flyers flock to the websites offering these deals more often. I decided to go through the process myself to experience the chance deals and establish a percentile that you would get a good deal each time you visit.
Starting with Expedia, I searched a flight for a family of 5 during February vacation. They would stay a week near Fort Myers in Florida, and leave from Boston, Massachusetts. I then adjusted the days to a more flexible schedule, to get the cheapest price. The cheapest ended up being 12 days, a Thursday to a Monday, for $413 a piece on JetBlue Airlines. I dug deep changing variables, seating arrangements, number of passengers (downed to four and a separate one because apparently 5 couldn’t fly together cheap.) After over an hour of digging the $413 price seemed to have the most realistic pickup and departure times for vacationers, and the lowest price of similar time/date-spans.
I went through the whole process of purchasing. All the steps except the final, and as soon as I submitted the information, an alert came up saying that the flight cost changed. $80 more. Ok, figured maybe by chance there were a bunch of other people out there trying to get the same flight, who took my tickets during my “digging” time period. Tried submitting again with the price change, same thing, now the tickets were near $600. I then did what I believed any good American family would do, swear off Expedia.
Next I decided to go with SideStep, a website that searches all the commonly visited airline deal websites. Pretty soon I was flying from Travelocity to Priceline to Airfare.com to a handful of other websites with tacky commercials on television. To my surprise (why surprised? I don’t know..) they all give the same runaround. That fake price when you search only to have it tainted by a newer price or a million layovers upon checkout…and maybe that occasional deal on the plane made out of tin-cans and duct tape – o wait, even that deal doesn’t exist.
My judgement: The family bites their tung off, clenches their teeth, and dishes out the $413..oops i mean…the inflated $637 dollar ticket due to “5 minute too late checkout fees,” or decides maybe a little more snow won’t hurt them this year.
