Stocktc1

Anyone had the bad/good experience of walk up fares? The most expensive the ticket can cost or a little cheaper due to less taxes, etc?

LondonElite

Yes, it can be all over the place.

Stocktc1

I wonder for the smaller flights, they just sell the tickets a little cheaper if they know there will be empty seats at takeoff.

LondonElite

There are so many factors involved it is difficult to generalise.

IADCAflyer

You simply cant generalize. I will say that for the most part airline fares do increase as the day of departure nears. Airlines do periodically have last minute (read: starting about 3 or 5 days prior to departure) offers on some routes that are low performers. But, my experience is that its better buy earlier (but not too early) rather than later.

I'm actually doing a mileage run next week. My round trip fare to LAX is $115 (lowest that Ive ever found). The same routing today is $320.

Often1

Ticket pricing is based on RM/IM algorithms which look at many factors. If the algorithm predicts that there will be heavy demand, it will only permit sales at higher fare buckets. If the contrary, it will open lower fare buckets.

There really is no such thing as a "walkup" fare and the concept is largely meaningless.

Historically, last minute purchasers have faced higher fares. That is because travel demand was so high that most flights were sold out or close to. That is no longer the case.

Thus, the answer is that it depends. Maybe last minute tickets will be cheap and maybe expensive. You will never be able to do as well as the algorithms, so it is not worth playing this game.

IADCAflyer

Also, bear in mind that unless you're on a purely nonstop pairing, the fare is influenced by the availabilty on every segment. So if you're flying DCA-MIA and the flight is empty, you might get a low fare bucket on the DCA-MIA leg. if your return is MIA-CLT-DCA and MIA-CLT is empty (which would normally avail you to lower fare buckets), but CLT-DCA is a full flight, the lack of low availability on the CLT-DCA leg is going to result in a high fare because the most restrictive fare bucket will apply to the entire return portion.

Finally, last minute fares are often not great deals. A fare booked 45 days advance might be $200 round trip; a 21-day fare may be $300; a 14-day fare may be $375; a 7-day fare may be $450; and a 3 day (effectively walkup) might be $550. That "last minute" fare is almost never as low as the $200 fare. Probably closer to something between the 21- and 14- day fare.

Stocktc1

About 1-2 hours before a flight it says purchase at airport on aa website. I wonder if it is any lower than the website price that day.

platbrownguy

No. It doesn't work like that. Nor are there lower taxes (??) as your OP indicates there might be.

To be fair, at first blush I thought your post was ridiculous, but then I remembered that Spirit was known to have lower walk-up fares than what you could get online or over the phone, at least for a while. Not sure if they still do. But the legacies don't work like that.

xliioper

DCA-MIA has 3 day advance Q fares available for around $89 (if there is Q bucket), but the cheapest fare with no advance purchase is a pricy $218 fare. DCA-ORD, for contrast, the cheapest fares are Q fares and have a 21-day advance purchase requirement and are $89. There are no deep discounted fares that allow relatively close-in purchase. The cheapest no advance purchase fare is $195.

Long Train Runnin

That is just because of how AA actually issues tickets vs UA and DL.


An airline would rather go out with an empty seat then suddenly offer a massive savings just because the plane is leaving in an hour and the seat is empty.

It would just lead to everyone trying to "score" a deal at the last second.

If you have a true need to suddenly be on a flight that leaves in 2 hours you are either on a business trip spending OPM so you don't care, or in another extraordinary experience where you just have to accept the cost for the situation.

Herb687

I do not understand the question.

Or if a revenue management analyst decides to fight the algorithms. Happens all the time.

The black box optimizes (or is supposed to optimize) revenue across the network. Individual entity teams in RM are evaluated based on THEIR markets. I'm sure you can figure out what that means in practice.

Sure there is. Use the term to anyone who works in airline revenue management and they will understand exactly what a walkup fare is: a zero advance purchase fare. The term walkup is used commonly and is synonymous with 0AP.


The above is not correct.

DCAMIA flow availability is not a function of what inventory is available separately on DCACLT and CLTMIA. Flow inventory for the DCACLTMIA service is calculated using the fare buckets that exist for the DCAMIA market.

You cannot assume that DCACLT open in Q and CLTMIA open in Q means that DCAMIA is open in Q. Nor can you assume that if one of the local segments is closed in a particular inventory that the flow is closed in that inventory.

Kacee

The fare is the fare. You don't get a discount by buying at the airport. It's possible they'll open discount inventory to sell open seats as departure nears, but it's equally, if not more likely that they'll only be selling Y/B fares, particularly on a business route (sometimes known as a "walk up" fare for exactly that reason).

ovacikar

Spirit and other ulcc's have a fee for online booking, this fee is just not applicable when you purchase at the airport sales office.

Centurion

Pre Covid American Airlines charged a fee for ticket counter service of at least $25.00-$50.00 so no deals. And not flexibility on waving the fee unless you were Exec Platinum