BA multiple tickets

[occasional]

I am looking to book a holiday in South Africa and expecting to book with British Airways. However it appears that, booking from my computer, three separate tickets are cheaper than putting the journey on one ticket.

This gives rise to two questions:

Is there a way of booking that will put the journey on one ticket ?

Can baggage be checked through when there are two tickets to the destination ?

[Hartington]

Each ticket is a separate contract. You will have to complete each contract and check in again. If you miss a flight you have invalidated your contract and you will have to buy a new ticket or at least upgrade/change your existing ticket. Using the normal connection times is therefore inadvisable.

There are reports that some check in staff are prepared to bend the rules but don't count on it.

[TightSlot]

Hartington is absolutely correct - think carefully before proceeding

[Joao da Silva]

Occasional

I often do this, but you have to think it through and be very careful.

At Xmas, our family went for a holiday and we chose BA for the long haul section, so we needed to get from where we are to London.

For various reasons (around status and miles upgrades), it was far less expensive to book two sets of tickets, home/london/home and london/holiday/london.

Now the rub, given the potential for disruption, we choose to fly to London the day before our holiday flight, even though we could have chosen flights on the same day that arrived 3 hours before our BA flight departed. We also added a couple of days to have fun in London afterwards.

The risk of missing a flight was very low and would have been covered by our insurance (e.g. if all flights from home to London had been canceled.)

So if you can add in an overnighter and de-risk the flights, why not. But if you plan a 3 hour connection and have 2 flights, you are taking a very big risk.

Would the saving pay for an overnighter?

[occasional]

Considering the advice I have managed to reduce the trip to two tickets which should reduce the risk involved.

What surprises me is that the anomaly appears to arise because one of the legs is flown by planes in BA colours, but because the operator is a separate airline, the fares to not appear to be integrated into the BA system. I find this rather misleading.

[Peter47]

I've just booked five sectors with DL (six actually because DTW - BWI - JFK with a 1 hr 50 min stopover was over $300 cheaper than DTW - JFK/LGA direct) and booked it as two tickets as it was cheaper. DL appears to use the philosophy used by LoCo carriers with single sector pricing but their website struggles if some flights can be booked in the lowest fare category but others at a reasonable time only only available in slightly less discounted bands). This will work where you are stopping over (I am spending three nights in Chicago between my tickets), DON'T try it if you are trying a quick connection.

As for through booking, by all means try it if you are on different tickets but don't bank on the airlines playing along, especially if the carriers are in different alliances. Even then there have been several posts in PPRuNe where BMI wouldn't interline to other Star Alliance carriers at LHR. Many years ago it was the norm, I took an early morning DL flight from MCO - JFK so I could spend the afternoon in NY before departing with BA to LHR. The DL agent checked the details on my BA ticket typed in a few details and hey presto! I doubt that would happen today, but then again fares are much lower.

Incidently, it is often worth trying a consolidator such as Trailfinders. A couple of years ago I booked a six sector itinerary with BA / QF. You couldn't (at least then) book more than four sectors on the BA website. Rang up BA - would have incurred a booking charge. I then rang up Trailfinders who by shifting the itinerary by one day saved me £200. They may have contacts with different airlines and can book you on one ticket.

One other thing whilst I think of it. Different airlines / routes sometimes have different baggage allowances with a lower or no allowance on the shorter sectors. With a multi-sector itinerary you will generally the most generous allowance applied to all sectors.

[Betty girl]

Think very carefully about booking the sectors separately.

Almost every time bad weather or something else delays a flight there is always at least one person on the flight that gets very upset because they are going to miss their connection or they will not have time to recheck their bags in in time to make their next flight.

I see it all the time and it is a false saving. Those checked through on one ticket get automatically booked on another flight if they arrive late but these people struggle to find a flight with any seats sometimes.

[occasional]

I have been trying to find a way of avoiding the multiple ticket problem, but what I find is that the BA booking engine is quite extraordinary.

The component flights to my trip (all on BA) appear to have a reasonably constant price over the period I might travel, and yet the cost of the combined ticket appears to vary by up to 30%, depending on the exact dates, for no discernible reason.

Could anyone explain what the booking engine is doing ?

[SLFLurker]

Each ticket is a separate contract. You will have to complete each contract and check in again. If you miss a flight you have invalidated your contract and you will have to buy a new ticket or at least upgrade/change your existing ticket. Using the normal connection times is therefore inadvisable.


Hmmm.

Booked a holiday through BA with flights from my local airport to LAX. All flights with BA but they've ticketed each sector separately, I've been assuming that I'd be able to through check our bags, is this not the case?

[Hartington]

You're making a fundamental error.

You are assuming that air fares are logical.

They are not.

(It really is that simple however annoying that may be).

[occasional]

You're making a fundamental error.

You are assuming that air fares are logical.

They are not.




But someone has to program the computer, and they are usually given some guidelines as to what they are trying to achieve.

I would grant you that in the case of BA the guideline may be to make the fares as obscure as possible.

However, given that this is an anonymous forum, there always might be someone who is prepared to elucidate.

[Joao da Silva]

I am not well versed in airline yield management systems, but will give you a view that might explain the logic behind the results, from a product management perspective.

If your business has historical records and an algorithm that can interpret these, it might find that

Product A has a constant value

Product B has a constant value

Product A + B combined has a variable value, depending on seasonal or other events, i.e. specific demand driven circumstances, which can be data mined and exploited.

Thus, applying for A+B might give a variable price, whereas the separate components may have constant values.

This is speculation for airlines, but I know it works in a very similar way in some other industries.

[Hartington]

Yes, someone has to program the computer. Once that is complete someone else will load the data (fares) upom which the program will act. At the same time somebody else is loading further data about how many seats are available in a given booking class and the same program will then work with that data and the fares data.

Let's say there is a fare A-B which requires you to be booked in G class. Fare is 100.00
There is another fare A-C which also requires you to be booked in G class and which can be used to go A-B-C. Say 150.00
Because of local conditions the fare B-C in G class is set at 30.00.
You look at A-B and the system says 100.00. Then you look at B-C and it says 30.00. Now you look at A-B-C and it says 150.00. You scratch your head and recheck your figures by going through the bookings again. In the meantime someone has amended the availability system to say G can only be sold in country X and you live in country Y when booking B-C. At the same time they load a new B-C fare in H class for 30.00. Now you can still see G for A-B at 100 and you also see B-C for 30 although now it's in H class. But G isn't avaiable to you on A-B and B-C because you don't live in country X so now when you ask for A-B-C it offers an H class fare which is 170.00.

The airlines set fares by what they think they can get away with, not by logic or miles. They also change them frequently. They change availability as well. They don't simply split the aircraft into H 20 seats and G 25 seats and leave it like that they keep changing the number of seats in each class (equates to the fare they want to realise for that seat). In fact I once saw an aircraft loaded in such a way that every class from the cheapest economy to business (there was no first) had 4 seats available. It didn't matter which class you tried to book, if you booked one seat all the other classes went down by 1. It was 48 hours before departure and the seat would be valueless if they didn't sell it so they figured "I'll take what I can get".