Pricing policy
 

Pricing for Club Europe on BA to Nice in December, out on a Wednesday, back on the last flight on Friday.

Last week: £318
Tuesday afternoon this week: just over £510
Wednesday morning (on booking before it went up again): £318

Does the computer choose the price at random, or is there method somewhere?

There is some method in the madness: essentially the airline distributes the available seats over the various fare categories and passengers can pick their ticket on a first come basis. Many airlines allow travel agents to "hold" tickets for 24 hours and you could have seen some tickets released when people cancelled their travel plans. It also could have been the airline looking at the ticket sales, deciding to throw in a new batch of low cost tickets.

If you have to travel and you see a nice fare: make the reservation now, you run the risk of paying a lot more if you wait. You can allow to wait for a better price if you can entirely cancel your trip.

there are also 2 other tips i was told about, however not sure how they work with each individual airline.

1. just prior to booking, make sure your cookies are cleared on your pc. i have tried this with a few of the 'normal' web based airlines, and suprisingly returned lower fares.

2. do not put in the exact dates you want to travel - instead try putting a day or 2 either side and then just select the correct dates from the selection offered (check earlier / check later). someone told me that they always do this and generally get cheaper fares because on the dates that you request - because the airline thinks that you actually want 'these dates' will offer a higher fare than the alternative dates. not 100% sure about this, but might be worth a try.

regards

I haven't seen such behaviour on the two websites I regularly use for checking prices and booking flights. Can you tell me for which websites you've observed this "cookie sensitivity"?

Additional tip:
3. Websites that compare prices from multiple airlines may come up with better deals; especially if you don't mind an extra stop in your flight.

Coming back, the Club Europe section had no passengers except for myself: going out, it was about 15% full with me. I expect the figures will change nearer the date, as Nice is very popular and sems generally to be full.

Strangely for an industry losing money, out of over 40 flights that I've done this year, very few have not hit at least an 80% load factor, and in most cases, 100%.

Mathfox, the one i clearly remember was thomsonfly.com, however i have been led to believe that there are a few others that sometimes seem to do the same (although this was a while back, so may have changed).

might have a play tomorrow when i have a little more time.

The airlines' Yield Management systems work on a bid/offer basis, when a request for a seat comes in they look at who else might bid for the same seat(s) and decide on the potential value and decide whether to accept the offer, reject it, or push it up into a higher yield management 'bucket'. It's very complex and hard to explain in a few words. They can also identify the point of enquiry and bias the display according to that.

For this and other reasons it is highly likely that the price of the same seat on the same flight can fluctuate depending on who is asking for it and when. Frustrating, but as MathFox said, you can gamble, you might win, you will more likely lose (which means the airline wins!).

You can sell anything if you sell it cheap enough. A full flight does not necessarily mean a profitable flight, unless you're Mr. O'Leary!

Cookies and booking
 

Always fully clear your cookies before using either BA or Virgin websites.

Capetonian,

I don't believe BA really sell seats at a loss, although they may well fill economy on the basis of marginal cost i.e. they break even on many seats and make the profit on others.

Madness - I have been looking to book LHR/YVR with BA in premium during Feb for a month, when I first looked for two people it was £1800 then it went to £2200 then to £4800. So I booked with Thomas Cook Premium at £1200!

Just checked again and it is £2200 again in which case I WOULD have booked BA.

Unhappy bunny now!!!