I booked my tickets and Hotel through Last Minute. Com as they had a special offer where you paid 10% upfront and the balance a few weeks before departure (at no extra cost) on Hotel/Flight Combo.
Have they dropped a bollock here as a dummy run on BA puts my fare for the two of us at 9256 Euros on the date and flights on our booking.
That is over twice the cost of our entire original booking including the Hotel.
The days around it are about what we paid but the Saturday's we are in and out have more than doubled.
Can a business fare jump from 863 Euros to over 2000 for the same flight overnight. How many bands of Business Class are there on one fare ?
The Economy Leg is now showing Y and the Business Class Leg D as the selling codes - hope yet ??? I can't believe someone would front up 9 Large for couple of tickets which don't give automatic access to a lounge, yet some 200 Euro special offer in Club Europe would !!
Where does a monolith like Last Minute get their Air Tickets from ?
ps For us it's 100 Euros each to reserve our seats - ie 400 in total. Is there a good chance we will be side by side without coughing up !! It's a 777 2-4-2
The fare class dictates various basic things about the ticket, but not the fare itself or the specific terms and conditions applicable to it; subsequent letters and numbers making up the fare basis do that.
This means that there is, in practice, an almost infinite number of possibilities for fare levels, and some fares are time-limited or have an advance purchase restriction on them. It’s entirely possible for a fare to expire or be removed from sale, or even a group booking to suddenly hoover up a chunk of availability, such that the best available fare for a route suddenly jumps.
As an example of the range that a longhaul Business Class fare on BA can fluctuate within, you can be looking at £1400 to £15,500 between London and LA.
In your case, matters are further affected by the fact that you’ve been ticketed at an opaque ‘IT’ fare, which stands for Inclusive Tour. This means that the fare is hidden, but behind the scenes will be drawn from yet another wide range of coded options.
There’s nothing dodgy about it, nor has anyone made a mistake; these are fares that are made available to the travel industry to allow them to create packages for retail clients, and it’s part of the overall revenue strategy of the airlines to sell seats, just like BR did with GoldenRail and Superbreak.
Typically, the terms and conditions for IT fares are more restrictive than public fares, although they sometimes have other advantages (like deferred balance payments).
In terms of what those paying the higher public fares are getting for their money, it’s rather more nuanced than lounge access. For a start, there’s a significant likelihood that those paying those fares are doing so frequently, which means that they will have loyalty programme status and get the lounge access door other perks automatically. Or, despite the fare existing, no-one might ever pay it, as for the same or less they’d go direct or via a different route anyway. Indeed, the airline may be deliberately throttling supply on that connection because they want to retain availability for point to point travel on the individual sectors.
With regard to the seat allocations, generally-speaking, there’ll be no issue with you being auto-allocated together, although you may find that there’s no opportunity to move to any other pairs.
The system is also clever enough to know that you’re on a heavily-discounted IT fare, and the passenger who has paid ‘full fare’ is the one that keeps the airline aloft, so they may find that more seats show as available to allocate online, even without status.