Originally Posted by alchemista

The articles on buying Frontier tickets at the airport ticket counter are missing key information typically.

The only reason to buy at the counter is that it saves you $23/person/segment by avoiding the Carrier Interface Charge (CIC). Sounds great right? Well, there are a lot of other gotchas on that:

1. Discount Den prices are only available online. At the counter they can only sell you the normal/non-DD fare price. Discount Den is almost always at least $10 cheaper per segment, and sometimes much more. This eats away at a lot of the $23 CIC savings, and possibly all of it. If you're a DD member, the value of buying at the counter is greatly reduced.

2. If you have elite status, especially 100K status, you don't get the full benefits buying at the counter. Yes, the agent can add your account #, but you will have to go back online and add your benefit options like bags, seats. You will NOT get the Works or any other bundle you qualify for, those are online-only bundles. For 100K/Works members, the main benefit you do not get is refundability which is a large benefit to give up. You cannot add that after the counter booking like you can with bags and seats.

3. TIME - you may have to wait for the agent, and then get them to go through the process and their systems on their terminal - all take much longer than an online booking. The couple of times I've tried it, they aren't very familiar with the process and it takes several minutes for just one booking.

4. Like time, there is convenience in doing it yourself online - you can more easily review each step and verify everything's OK.

In general, if you have DD and/or good status, I think the in-person booking is a waste. Best case you're probably saving less than $10/person/segment and then spending a lot of time vs. online. If you don't have DD, and your trip is enough to care about trying to save $23/person/segment - there's a good chance DD is worth it to you and then at-counter is not worth it.

I wish I would have known all these points before expecting to save a bunch at the counter and wasting both the time of the agent and myself (I ended up not even buying one thing from them after about a 45 minute experience). The first results that come up when searching online only mention how great the $23/person/segment savings is. So I'm sharing these extra details here.

I tried this all this week, so this is a recent data set.