OhDoctor

Looking at a multi-city NYC-HEL / CPH-NYC itinerary, with legs operated by AY, AA, and BA. I am able to book the identical itinerary on AA.com and Finnair.com for the same price, ~$6500. Previously, this was also available on BA.com for the same price, and so I was hoping to leverage the AARP discount and book on BA.com. However, today when I went to book, BA's price is now $11000 despite AA and AY still showing the same $6500 if I book through them. Google flights now advises me to book through a phone agent from BA in order to obtain the same $6500 price point, whereas it previously displayed a link to BA.com.

So, my question is, what gives?

EDIT: For some reason the title of the post was automatically changed to ~. It was previously: "Price on BA.com suddenly higher than partner carriers?"

OhDoctor

Annoying. I can't seem to change the post title on my own.

Saltire74

madfish

Could be some issue with booking class availability. Would try again and keep an eye on booking classes.

aardvarkdave

I've had this on many occasions; typically AA giving a materially lower quote than BA for a complex itinerary. Usually a good BA phone agent has been able to replicate it, I think by changing the point of sale.

What also affects it is the level of flexibility you want; sometimes BA seem to massively over-quote, forcing a J class for fully flex when often, ex-EU, R is sufficient for fully flex. I've been quoted £9+k for an itinerary that my "best" agent at BA could do for £4.5k on identical terms.

OhDoctor

Strange. I was going to call BA today, but just like that, it's back to $6500 on all three websites again. We'll chalk it up to BA.com idiosyncrasy. Thanks!

Lucanesque

You'll see this all the time, different OW carriers having different prices for the same flights on codeshare. For example, for a trip I need to do to NYC in a couple of weeks it's cheaper by a couple of hundred quid to book IB than BA

flatlander

I'm a little unclear on whether it was the same flights (marketed by the same carriers) or not. You're quite right that the same operated flight can be sold at different prices by different marketing carriers. There can also be failure to get the lowest price or find a suitable fare, so one website can't get as low a price as another even for the same marketed flights, which is what I was understanding the first post was about.

Usually I have to use a more complex itinerary to show this problem, but I have definitely had situations where even ITA Matrix didn't find as low a price as the AA website did (DUB-HNL routed round the houses for tier points). Often the converse is the case, of course! Searching for airline fares is always the sort of thing that has optimisation algorithms with heuristics and time-bounded searches, since enumerating every possible fare and route combination is far too slow on even a TATL open jaw, let alone anything complex. Quality of algorithms affects this most, but simply random chance can also affect it. You can even get ITA Matrix to show you different results at different times from the same availability, based on random factors affecting whether it finds one particular cheap combination or not.

richi

Probably just inventory-management logic changing availability in a cheaper bucket. And codeshares have separate inventory.

The reason it appears "sudden" is... well... it's not a gradual change. I'll get my coat.

allturnleft

Is there an impending sale ?
Easter is approaching

OhDoctor

Well, on each of the 3 websites, they're all operated identically, i.e. NYC-HEL operated by AY; CPH-LHR operated by BA; LHR-JFK operated by AA.

However, they're marketed differently on each site: On AA, marketed as AA 8986, AA 6387, AA 105; on AY, marketed as AY 6, AY 5925, AY 4015; on BA, marketed as BA 6006, BA 813, BA 1506. I'm assuming this is what you mean by marketed differently -- however, the price on all 3 was identical for the past several weeks, and is now identical again today; but for one single day, it was nearly double on BA.com while remaining the same on AY and AA.

Globaliser

That could happen if for example BA's revenue management department decides for one reason or another to withdraw inventory in the relevant booking class for a short period. If the other airlines don't decide to do the same thing, then buying the BA flight numbers will be more expensive because they will be priced using different booking class inventory and therefore different fares.

But one thing that this is unlikely to be is a "ba.com idiosyncracy". If ba.com is pricing flights, it's pretty much guaranteed that that is accurately using the inventory and fares data that is being supplied to it.

dearglfc

I just booked my family holiday flights through AA but flying CW on BA planes. AA cost was £7k but booking the same flights through BA was £30k

Guy Betsy

IIts BA's ingenius IT technology...

I've booked flights ... exact same flights, all operated by BA, with BA flight numbers. Same booking classes, same dates. Booked on expedia.co.uk AND ba.com
ba.com basically comes out MORE expensive than expedia. I cannot for the life of me, figure out how this is even possible...

I wanted ba.com due to a travel voucher that I wanted to redeem against. And you know the way BA gives you the cold shoulder if you book through an OTA and not them..

In the end I booked on QR. BA's loss.

flatlander

Yes, that's what I mean by marketed differently. A marketing partner takes some responsibility, but also some commercial risk, for selling the seat and can set the price, so there is an arbitrage opportunity between different marketing partners as described above.

BA can usually book the codeshares on most fares, and they can even issue a ticket with a fare of a different carrier on most fares especially within a joint business agreement. I currently have a ticket OTP-LHR-HEL-JFK-LAX-PHX and vice-versa ticketed by BA, on an AY fare code, with various flights operated and marketed by BA, AY and AA. You need to talk to someone to get that done, though. I used spare time in the lounge at Heathrow to get one of the agents there to do this one.

Their website sucks, but the actual ticketing system can do all the things.