<p>bummer.
We were watching the fare prices for a few days. Decided to purchase. Brought up the ticket information on the computer, and held it on the screen while we called to verify something. Computer died, brought it back onto the screen, and the prices soared more than 20% in 5 minutes. Tried clearing cookies, checking booking sites, but no luck.</p>
<p>Our typical luck!
Anyone else fall into the same trap?</p>
<p>huh? What airline? try Kayak for the itinerary and see if that works…</p>
<p>Have you tried clearing out cookies, browsing history, etc.? Sometimes it works.</p>
<p>Since most airline give you 24 hours to pay, my trick is to make a reservation and then check the price the next day. If the price is the same, I make a new reservation and then cancel the old one. I repeat this until the price goes up at which point I pay.</p>
<p>We’ve had that happen on Air Canada, sometimes calling in works, as once the ticket agent on the phone could “see” the fare I wanted though I could not</p>
<p>I’ve seen that happen before. Not only does it ratchet up, it sometimes ratchets down and back and forth.</p>
<p>Happened to me one time (on Travelocity), then I hopped to Expedia immediately and there was the lower fare! I snapped it up right away. So it pays to look around if your fare jumps up.</p>
<p>yepp…tried all those methods. It was Delta. We cleared cookies and history, then immediately tried Travelocity, Kayak, Orbitz, you name it. They all jumped up. Kept looking for the 24 hour period. Never came back down, so we left them as is. I don’t want to look now since they’re ours ;-)</p>
<p>Today I found that booking directly on Hawaiian air’s website saves me $150 a ticket over expedia. Try the airline’s website.</p>
<p>UCDAlum, if you subscribe to their e-mails, they will send you pretty useful spam about special deals, like another $50 off of the lowest fare.</p>
<p>Well today is your day. Wednesday is the best day to buy airline tickets. Also try buying them a few minutes past midnight. That is when the reservation systems dump any cancel or changed reservations and free up seats with good fairs.</p>
<p>musicamusica, is that after midnight Eastern time?</p>
<p>I believe it is wherever the airline is headquartered.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, it has happened to me so many times. I am the booking agent for the family and getting a commitment on dates and times from different members of the family is a nightmare, especially when I see a low fare and I don’t hear back from them. Many times I see a good fare by accident and after a discussion with H to try to commit, the fare is gone literally within minutes.</p>
<p>Happened to me just yesterday. I had been watching fares for awhile and on Tues. flight I wanted was $400 total. Yesterday when I decided I needed to go ahead and make the purchase, the tickets were $442 total!! Over 10% in one day! Could kick myself now but I was really hoping price would go down. Yeesh.</p>
<p>One of the colleges that accepted S offered to pay for his airfare so that he could visit on Admitted Students Day. The itinerary they sent was a bit crazy – had him flying out of an airport that was not the most convenient for our location, and changing planes both ways, which made for two very long trips. So I checked Kayak.com and quickly found nonstop flights (from a different airport, which actually works better for us) at what I thought was a very reasonable price. I think it was around $265 round trip. </p>
<p>So I emailed the Admissions Office and asked if they could change the reservations to the flights I had found, which they did with no problem. (I think it is possible it was cheaper than the flights they had originally booked him on, although I don’t know what those flights cost.)</p>
<p>Anyway, just a week or so later I checked Kayak.com again, just to make sure I had not missed a better flight. Well, the flight that I had found before (and which luckily he is already booked on, at the $265 price) is now $800! It just amazes me that the price could go up 300% in such a short time frame!</p>
<p>When booking a trip for our family of five, I got a low price for a single traveller and a higher price when I put in all 5. I decided to take a chance and book each of us individually. Rates, from the airline, were $410 for the first traveller, $420 for the second, $430 for the third, and so on. I thought that was really strange.</p>
<p>^^^ - I was checking hotel reservations for two rooms and saw the same thing. It came up with a cheaper rate for one room. The funny thing was that one hotel in the same chain did that while another didn’t.</p>
<p>toledo, that happened to us, too. Just two people flying, the second ticket cost more than the first. Our first thought was to book two tickets separately. But then when I logged on to do that, the fare was much lower than what my husband had gotten, and there was no “surcharge” for the second ticket. So I booked the two tickets. </p>
<p>I have also seen the prices jump. I’m beginning to think that you have to book the tickets the first time you see them if you are sure you are going to fly. We’re planning several trips in the next few months, and I’m wondering if we should designate one computer/Internet connection as the first-look one, and another as the time-to-buy one.</p>
<p>And I thought Tuesday was the cheapest day to buy (although that hasn’t worked for me).</p>
<p>Use Yapta or Kayak to track fares in advance of purchase so you’ll have a sense of price trends. Kayak provides graphs of fares purchased by Kayak customers. After purchase, enter your fare data into Yapta so Yapta can send you a notice in case the fare drops. After a documented fare drop, call the airline to request a refund of the price difference. (Orbitz.com’s refund the difference program requires that another orrbitz customer actually purchase the same trip at a lower price, so your chances of obtaining a refund are lessened.)</p>