jwhite4

I'm a little p*ssed right now. Continental has been running a fare sale to Hawaii for a few weeks now (http://www.continental.com/web/en-US...fares_hnl.aspx if it still works). I was pricing out flights as late as 10pm EDT: different cities, different dates, all coming up at the advertised sale price (basically as low as $535 r/t).

Got stuck on a call from work, get back on 11:10pm to start to book them, all gone! ...! Doesn't "Purchase your round-trip ticket by March 11, 2009" mean 1159pm on Mar 11? I called Continental just to confirm, the agent who was in Central time said he wasn't seeing those fares anymore. He tried to say, "maybe there was no more ticket availability...", but that wasn't the case, they just ended the sale.

It can't be DST related - if their computer systems didn't change last week, it will be an hour earlier (still 3/11).

Has anyone else any experience on what time(s) fare sales end (particularly advertised ones such as this)?

Thanks.

Jeff

aacharya

Lo and behold, the Europe sale fares ended today as well. And my holds expired last night. Sigh. That was a $100 savings a ticket.

craz

FWIW, those holds expired at 5pm Time Zone of wherever the 1st flight was leaving from

It does say Midnight of where the flight is leaving from but Trust me its 5pm. I was late yesterday in getting back to tkt a 'hold' myself and at 5:03 it was still on my Co acct when I clicked 'purchase now' I found out it was already cancelled, a good thing the seats were still available. And since its now with a new PNR I have till 5pm today for a Refund

yea you can always call up Web-Support who can reinstate it in most cases but not always the seats you picked will still be available

CO really should fix this by either cahnging the time on the PNRs to 5pm or changing everything back to 'Midnight' that was used till recently.

worldwidetraveler

I don't know how many times advice has been given on this forum : If you see a fare that looks good to you, grab it since it could disappear within minutes!

sc4eva

Ah - I see my Madrid flight went from $350 to $520

aacharya

Well, in this case it wasn't a 'lucky' or unexpected fare, but a general pan-European sale. I agree that I should have locked in, but just didn't think that "one more day" would matter. And I didn't utilize the 24-hour cancellation trick...teaches me for going out late last night.

jwhite4

I understand that on typical unadvertised sales. But I don't lump that into the sale category as on ongoing sale, with a full webpage, and an advertised end date.

I was actually searching online to see if they had the 24 hr cancellation, and couldn't find confirmation of that. I finally did get confirmation of that (when I spoke to the agent), but by that time it was too late.

Jeff