Fares and Travel Agents... [question about WT+ fares]
 

I wonder if anyone has any advice on whether we are being told the truth by our travel agents or not...

We booked 4 WTP tickets from EDI-DFW; the travel agent charged us approx £2600 each for our tickets.

The problem - of course - came when we wanted to cancel one of these tickets, it turns out that the tickets are non-changeable and non-refundable. The agent told us flexible tickets (in W) for the same trip would have cost about another £1500 each...

Investigating on the BA web site - fully refundable/changeable (W class) tickets for the same journey are approx. £2400.

However, does what we are being told make any sense - can you buy a restricitive ticket for £2600 (including the travel agents fee) when the fully flexible ticket (on-line) costs £2400?

(I know we should have checked; but the reason the company uses the travel agent is that they are supposed to do all the work for us!)

What fare code is showing in MMB? Click on the flight number in the 'my booking' tab.

The fare code is a 'T' - so I guess it is definitely restricted; and the fare they quoted us was GBP2525.60 (and then the agent add their bit).

So the question is really how come we get charged this price for a restricted ticket when the full W fare seems to be about £2420? I'm not really questioning what we have - more questioning whether it seems feasible that you pay a fare which appears to be more than the full fare price and end up with a restricted ticket?

You've been robbed, basically. No way should a TA be charging that much for a T-class fare.

What is the fare code EDI-LHR? Is it possible it combined an expensive, yet restrictive domestic add on and then IIRC the most restrictive conditions apply to the journey?

I fear, your beef is with your TA and not BA.

That said, EF shows the T fare is about £600 (excluding taxes). So wonder if they screwed up the booking?

Perhaps I should make it clear; I'm have no problem with BA at all! I am posting this here purely because I thought the people here might have some idea what is going on. I apologise if I am using the board incorrectly.

The EDI-LHR is in 'L'.

The agent claims that they haven't screwed up and fares change all the time! In my experience at least the flexible fares are pretty consistant...

Nonsense. There might have been marginal fare changes, and a slight change in fuel surcharge, but a T-class fare has always been significantly less than you've been charged.

Why continue to use a TA? Unless you have a very complex journey or it is mandated by your Company you can do most things on ba.com or by a phone call to BA. :confused:

Veering OT for a mo, does anyone actually pay their TA a service charge for personal/leisure travel ?

I know that TAs don't earn the same commissions they did when I was in the industry 20 years ago, but my local (to the office) agent will happily book multi-sector non-full-fare Y & J itineraries for the published fare with no extras.

To be fair, I do much of the research beforehand and I do take some complex routings, so it may be more interesting that the run-of-the-mill stuff they usually do.

I am very pleased to have found someone I can trust and so avoid various Indian call centres ;)

To the OP: if you're happy to post more details of dates, times, fare bases, etc, I'm sure someone would be happy to validate the information against KVS, EF, etc.

hth

Thanks - I'm happy to quote the details, though I cannot see details of the fare bases anywhere (other than the classes mentioned), but the trip details are:


BA1463 Depart: Sat 6 Dec 2008, 19:20, Arrive: Sat 6 Dec 2008, 20:40, Selling class: L
BA193, Depart: Sun 7 Dec 2008, 10:45, Arrive: Sun 7 Dec 2008, 15:00, Selling class: T
BA192, Depart: Thu 11 Dec 2008, 16:50, Arrive: Fri 12 Dec 2008, 07:40, Selling class: T
BA1438, Depart: Fri 12 Dec 2008, 08:55, Arrive: Fri 12 Dec 2008, 10:15, Selling class: V

So I expected the tickets to be fairly expensive since they do not include a Saturday night - but I did not expect them to be both expensive and restricted!

Because - as you say it's mandated by my company. When I travel alone I can get round this requirement most of the time. But since this was a more 'complex' trip (4 people!) - we had to use them.

The most irritating thing about using the TA in my experience (other than the cost) - is the lack of ability to manage the booking online or via telephone BA (normally they insist that changes can only be made at the airport directly when a TA booked the ticket). Sometimes contacting the TA when half way around the world is not convenient!

It's the domestic segments that have pushed the price up I bet.

By 1500 quid??

A full J LHR-EDI is £400 return. But these seem to be booked in cheapy class.

When were these intially booked? To get the T fare, it is 21 days advance purchase. So I wonder if they combined a fully flex W with the L/V domestics and did them as add ons (or is the term sectorised it?) and that's causing the problems.

To the OP, I really think you need to tear into your TA. Get them to send you a fare break down or put your PNR into viewtrip.com/checkmytrip.com and see if there is a fare break down on the e-ticket receipt.

I think it comes down to a crap TA. Any return which doesn't include a Saturday night will cost a fortune, but you knew that. However, such a return should at least be cancellable.

Booking online I don't think you would actually be able to buy a non-cancellable return which didn't include a Saturday night. You'd pay a fortune but get a semi-flex ticket.

However, TAs always seem to have access to extra-crap fares. I know our TA somehow has access to the most useless fare buckets imaginable (i.e. really expensive but not properly flexible!).