BA Single Fares

[Hial Flyer]

I was looking at fares from SOU-GLA with BA.

The return fare for 2 people was £117.00 The timings weren't great so i checked to fly one way with BA and back with Flybe.

The single fare with BA was £228 each!! £456 for the two people.

How can they justify such a rip-off with their single fares.

I booked with Flybe.

[In trim]

.....and with fares like that it's no wonder they (and other 'traditional' airlines) have to grapple with high (and often erratic) no-show factors, and therefore overbooking profiles.

I was in exactly the same situation with BA a while ago where I needed to make an "open-jaw" trip, LGW-TLS / MRS-LGW. I saved £800 by booking a cheapy LGW-TLS-LGW and a separate MRS-LGW-MRS booking, and simply no-showed on the second sector of each booking.

You've got to know how to play the system!!

[Globaliser]

In trim: I was in exactly the same situation with BA a while ago where I needed to make an "open-jaw" trip, LGW-TLS / MRS-LGW. I saved £800 by booking a cheapy LGW-TLS-LGW and a separate MRS-LGW-MRS booking, and simply no-showed on the second sector of each booking.

You've got to know how to play the system!!Couldn't you have played the telephone system? As in phoned up and said "I'd like to buy an open-jaw ticket, please, LGW-TLS/MRS-LGW". That would have been a valid open-jaw routing and would have been priced as two half-returns.

The only real irritation is that ba.com STILL can't do open-jaw at destination - years after it was promised - and you end up paying an offline fee to do something that you can't do online.

But in fact there are now increasing numbers of BA short-haul destinations for which there are cheap one-way fares.

[In trim]

Globaliser,

Totally agree......at the time wasn't aware I could have got the 'open-jaw' option by phone. Having said that, by buying two cheapy restricted returns I got a very cheap deal and doubt it would have been beaten by this other option.

[PAXboy]

HF "How can they justify such a rip-off with their single fares."

This goes w-a-a-y back into history. The subject has been discussed many times on PPRuNe. The mis-match between single and return fares and full fare and discount and bucket shop (remember that term?) and on-line/off-line, is all to do with the way airlines used to do business. And I mean used to do business 30 years ago.

Given the circumstances that you describe, most people decide to book the return ticket (if the price is right) and then throw away the return. The airlines know this but do not wish to change a basic tenet of their pricing strategy. By the way, if you plan to use only the second half of a return - Don't! If you do not use the first sector, then the second (and any others) will automatically be deleted.

There are, of course, many other aspects of history, such as the 'Saturday Night' rule but that would take even longer. There are many places to seek this information.

[Globaliser]

In trim: Having said that, by buying two cheapy restricted returns I got a very cheap deal and doubt it would have been beaten by this other option. If you need to try it again, you might be pleasantly surprised. I've just played with this using a single search/price engine for dates in March (to be sure of hitting the lowest possible fares - all these are in N class). This engine sometimes doesn't get the tax right, but at least using it should mean that it's consistently wrong in these examples. All fares stated inclusive, then exploded into NUC calculation.

One way fares:-
LGW-TLS £75.90 (NUC 97.44 + tax)
MRS-LGW £60.20 (NUC 69.77 + tax)

Returns:-
LGW-TLS-LGW £98.50 (NUC 48.72 + 48.72 + tax)
LGW-MRS-LGW £89.10 (NUC 40.44 + 40.44 + tax)
MRS-LGW-MRS £83.10 (NUC 34.88 + 34.88 + tax)

Open jaw:
LGW-TLS/MRS-LGW £93.10 (NUC 48.72 + 40.44 + tax)

You can see that the open jaw ticket is literally calculated as half the LGW-TLS-LGW fare plus half the LGW-MRS-LGW fare, then adding the appropriate taxes. It is by far the cheapest option for the trip, even allowing for:- Cheap one-ways now being on offer on these routes, which is probably pretty new. MRS-LGW-MRS being cheaper than LGW-MRS-LGW, if you were going to buy two returns and throw away the return half of both. The fact that you've got to pay the offline charge on top of that open jaw fare in order to make a telephone booking for something that you can't do online.If it's a valid route, an open jaw return is usually the best thing to do.