WOW! Airtran rates just went astronomical here!

I had looked at booking a ONE WAY from CMH to FLL for mid July on Airtran (for 4 of us). Yesterday, it was $141. Same exact flight today is $545! The same out of Dayton for the same day. The price just tripled? How can airlines justify this? The price of gas is down so it's not a fuel thing. I really get tired of all this and it makes me want to travel less and less.

Southwest for the same route is $220 per person one way. If I don't get a chance to snag those, I will just drive. It will be way cheaper at this point? I'm certainly not paying $2200 just to get my group back home on an Airtran flight.

It could be that availability in the lower fare class that sold for $141 does not have 4 seats available, so that's why you're getting a higher price. Try searching for 1, 2, 3 and then, 4 seats and see what results you get. You may be surprised by what you notice.

Also, keep in mind that prices usually go up on weekends as that's when most people usually have time to make travel plans. If you wait a few more days until Tuesday afternoon (after 3pm ET), you may be able to find the cheapest options there.

For domestic travel, a lot of sites don't advise buying so much in advance - about 3 months out will be much better - so, for travel in July, probably start looking in April. With a party of 4, may not want to chance it but here's a website you can look at with tips and everything I mentioned:

http://traveltips.usatoday.com/airli...est-56973.html

Good Luck!

I just checked 2 tickets instead of 4, the price was the same. The funny thing is; out of 108 seats, 82 are open (in coach). This made me laugh out loud.

Phoenixinct: thank you for the info (link). I normally don't buy airfare in advance but since our trip isn't long after the July 4th holiday, I was taking into perspective that the flights would just go up closer to travel. Of course, I didn't imagine that they would triple 6 months out.

Using the online seat map is not a good indicator of how many seats are available on a flight. This is because you don't have to pre-select a seat with Airtran. There could be a lot of seats sold but the people didn't want to pay the fee to select the seat. Theoretically it is possible that there is only one seat available on a flight but all the seats show as open.

If you're laughing, it shows that you don't understand what you're looking at and how revenue management works in a dynamically-priced industry.

1. The seat map tells you which seats are available for selection. It has nothing to do with how many seats have been sold. Especially on FL where many people choose not to pay extra for seats, there may well be 80 seats not yet reserved, but only 10 reservations left to sell.

2. FL, just like every other carrier, has sophisticated software which determines pricing and how to allocate seats within fare buckets. Needless to say, FL wants to sell as many seats at higher fares as it can. It is likely that FL's analysts believe that the date/time/sales to date and so forth, coupled with historical data, show that the flight will sell more seats closer to the travel date. So, higher prices. FL can always add seats back to the lower fare bucket closer to the flight date if it can't sell them at the higher price.

The fares haven't gone up for the flight you want. It's just that the cheap seats you wanted were purchased by somebody else before you.

All that stuff about seat maps, inventory, fare buckets, etc is generally true. But I'd bet money that is not at all what is gong on here at all.

If you actually check CMH-FLL for mid July, day after day the CMH-FLL nonstops are priced like that....day after day except Saturday when the nonstops are in line with other connecting fares. The coach fare listed on those nonstop flights is priced higher than business class fare. There is absolutely no way they purposely put a fare like that out there because they think anybody will pay it, or because the planes are so heavily booked six months out day after day. That's foolish thinking.

A much more reaonable explanation is that either this is a glitch, or that all the discount fare buckets are zeroed out because there is a flight change not fully loaded. If it is a "glitch" it could be something going wrong, or it could simply be a normal quirk that is temporarily out there when they do certain schedule changes. A similar glitch that is seen all the time with AirTran is that when they push out their booking window, the newly-added flights only show full coach for a day or two until the full range of fare inventory is loaded. That could be what has happened here. It's possible that they pulled and re-loaded this flight (perhaps the flight number or times changed) and the discount fares will be loaded with a few days.

If this were a garden variety "My flight for next week went from $119 to $209" complaint, then things like sale expiration, cheap seats selling out, etc would make total sense. But there's simply no plausible way that those sorts of reasons explain why day after day the nonstop CMH-FLL is priced at $500-ish one way six montht out.

I'd bet that within a few days, the nonstop flight will include much lower fares, or it will disappear from the schedule.

Often1, your post made me laugh again. I know a lot more then you think about travel. I was platinum on USAir for many years when I flew for business constantly. This isn't my first rodeo. An airline does not show open seats that aren't available when you go through the booking progress. They black out seats that are sold as unavailable of which there were. This isn't rocket science.

Knope2001, I will keep you posted on what happens in the next few weeks. I'm betting your correct with that many available seats. I'll post when (and if) I finally book my seats. I appreciate your input.

I concur, knope. Saturday departures show all Coach fare classes available, in both directions, generally, except G and X. Other days of the week show only available seats in Y and W in Coach, and all classes in BC. Those two Coach classes are generally higher than BC fares. Southwest also has nonstops on the route; perhaps the AirTran service is being transitioned over to WN, except on Saturdays. The next schedule extension is due within a couple of weeks. That might also include some changes to explain what's happening with the July CMH-FLL nonstops.

It sure looks like there is something going on with some of the FLL flights on FL - not just the CMH service. The fares for some flight numbers are crazy high - even for BC fares, when no BC seats have even been booked on those flights. The dates are not peak travel times, either.

Check your flights again; the fares are now within normal $ range, with all fare classes loaded.

Book Coach in mid-July from $116 one-way, subject to actual date's availability.

You guys love to speculate and make mountains out of mole hills.

In any case this has everything to do with the schedule being refreshed and inventory being re-combed over (and the fact that you are searching for flights far out compounds the magnitude).

I wasn't making a mountain out of a molehill. We are traveling on July 4 returning on the 14th of July. Any holiday time, they will jack the rates up high because they know people will pay it. Since I had 4 bodies to get there and back, the prices were bad on the weekend. A one way ticket jumped from $141 to $562. I've seen at times (not always but there have been occasions) where the prices stuck. They went up and only came down a bit. If it had just been 2 of us, it wouldn't have been so bad.

I have since booked my tickets. I got one way's both directions for $141 nonstop. A third of what the flights had gone up too this past weekend. Once again, had there not been a holiday involved in this trip, I would have booked them probably around May. The cruise we have booked has gone up at least $500 per person per cabin since it was booked last summer. Once again, this is close to a holiday. It's that darn supply and demand theory again. This will teach me to quit traveling near a holiday again. LOL

This is slightly different with FL. Because they have a fee to select your seat at time of booking, many pax choose not to select a seat until the 24 hour window, when the charge is waived. Therefore, it is usually safe to assume that many more seats be available to choose than are available to be sold. Or conversely, many seats that have been sold haven't been reserved for a specific pax, and therefore are still open on the seat map. With FL, you can't count empty seats and assume it's the same as unsold seats.