"Looks like there's high demand for this flight." gives us more money.
 

Am I the only one that ever gets this message when booking a Delta flight? Book a flight at the web price or miles on the website, go through all the steps, hit pay and then they are asking for $75 more dollars or 10,000 more miles. It has happen to me 5 time this year, so today I booked a flight on JetBlue.

The website sometimes has errors like that. Note the first price that the booking system displays, and call reservations. They should be able to price it properly.

Has anyone had any luck getting it repriced?

My explanation of what goes wrong is this: the reservation system and the booking system are separate. This is why, when you go to purchase a flight, you sometimes get an error message. It's only at that point that it checks up-to-the-moment inventory in the booking system. The quote that the reservation system gives you may be minutes or even hours old, and in the meantime a cheaper fare class could have sold out.

But this is only my interpretation of what's happening. I'd like to know if DL will actually honor the lower fare.

Data point for your consideration.

A few weeks ago, I was working on booking a domestic flight. I found the fare I wanted, but got the same page. This time, the price offered was nearly twice what was advertised. I tried again a few hours later, same results--low price in the search result, but 2x on the "high demand" page.

With my fingers crossed, I called Reservations. I gave the CSR the flight numbers and they encountered the same problem. The CSR then called someone else (tech support?). When she came back on, she told me she was able to offer me the tickets at the advertised price I wanted.

As a lowly FO, I thought there was no way I was going to convince them to honor the advertised price.

Yes. It took about 15 minutes on the phone (no phone charge). When I suggested they had some IT challenges the CSR demurred, but admitted that this "sometimes" happens.

Had a lot of issues this past Monday trying to book a multi-city Europe-US-South America-Caribbean-Europe itinerary. Every time the credit card payment was processing, it was interrupted and asked me for twice the price originally quoted. Kayak, ITA, Google flights quoted the original price, as well as expedia, but could not book. Tried to book by phone but the agent could not see the original fare, and my travel agent was unable to price the fare even though she could see the original price and the availability.

Had to add an extra stop to the itinerary in order to get the original fare at dl.com.

DL will not honor the lower fare (At least to a Gold/Almost Platinum Medallion and a Silver/Almost Gold Medallion). The best way to go about it is to contact a travel agent, who will find a work around.

FWIF, Delta eliminated all direct ticketing charges:

http://news.delta.com/delta-cuts-tic...oney-customers

After some googling I came across this thread and found that it's relatively new, so I wanted to keep it going...

This "bait and switch" that Delta is doing is still going on. Booked a multi-city trip (Europe, South America, US) and the original price quoted by aggregators and the Delta website itself was 900€... After putting in my information, credit card, everything and clicking purchase: "...high demand [blah blah blah]... new fare is 1000€" -_-

Called Delta customer service to see if they might see a different price and they quoted me even higher at $1130 (~1050€).

did you call reservations in the US? If so they charge in US $ and use a DL exchange rate that adds about 5% to tickets that originate in another country

so they likely were seeing the new higher fare too

I wish there was consumer protection law which would require airlines/expedia/etc honour the advertised price as long as there a seat in requires cabin. If their is higher demand and booking class is sold out by the time you click "purchase" (or more common: they cached availability long time ago and did not bother to update before displaying results) they should eat up the difference.

This is easy to fix.

Log out of your Delta account and try again. You'll get the price but you just have to manually enter in your SM again.

TLDR, not saying it's a bad idea, but by no means is it a straight forward simple fix.


Not a horrible idea, but I think it would be very unwieldy in practice...how long would a person have? If I search for tickets and it shows $500, and then I go to dinner, and come back an hour later, leaving the purchase screen up that still shows $500, but now it's $600, is that fair? There would have to be some kind of countdown like you get with concert tickets...doable, but then you're going to get people screaming about high pressure tactics from airlines. Does they airline eat the cost, does the website, is it a combo?

What about odd spikes in demand...think about how many ATL, GRB, PIT, & BOS to IAH/HOU tickets where just one click away at the start of the AFC & NFL championship games respectively.

There is a lot more variables for airline tickets than for most other consumer products.

If I'm looking at a flight with a connection, someone else is looking at the same originating flight but a different connection, while at the same time a third person is looking at the same connecting flight I am with a different origination how do we decide priority? Wouldn't airlines/travel sites give the priority to the more expensive ticket, forcing others into higher fare buckets?

When Amazon tells me there is 6 of something left, I'm only "competing" with people looking for the exact same product I am.

Is it theoretically doable, yes, but I don't think it's just a simple as enforcing some type of guarantee.

Just a quick comment to let everyone know that this "glitch" is still going on with Delta.

I got the "high demand" message just after entering my credit card details, and was offered a fare that was 20% higher than what I'd been booking up to that point. First time around, I believed the message. I know that airfares can change quickly, and I figured I was just unlucky. I was almost tempted just to eat the extra cost because I didn't want to go back to the beginning and have to re-enter all my family's details, choose seats again, etc.

But I like to save money. So I went back to the beginning and chose a different flight that had the same fare as my first choice. Oh good, I thought, I'll be able to get this low airfare after all. But guess what happened. Yes, this flight was also in "high demand" with a 20% premium. At this point I felt like I was getting scammed.

Normally, I'd start looking for a different airline, but I'm using some big Delta vouchers. My wife called them and spent about 45 minutes having them manually re-enter all the details. Whaddaya know? The fare we paid over the phone ended up being the same amount as what was advertised at the beginning of the process. That's how it should be.

There is little doubt in my mind that this is intentional and that they easily make a few extra tens of thousands every day from chumps. Call it "bait and switch" or "false advertising" or whatever. But the moral of the story is that if you have to fly Delta, make your arrangements the old fashioned way, and keep one eye on your wallet.

If that were the case this thread would be full of such reports, instead of a few isolated incidents. I have seen this message too, but only when clicking through from Google Flights and/or constructing something complicated on ITA.

This could be due to cached results; but in one case I got the same "prices have gone up" over a period of several days, so that couldn't have been the explanation. But I have subsequently seen where ITA puts together an itinerary for a much lower price because it is not taking married segments into account, and an EF search shows that the full trip is not available in the indicated booking class.

I agree in the latter case it would be nice if DL figured that out on the first page rather than the checkout page that what you're trying to do does not have inventory or violates fare rules, but I don't think it rises to the level of "scam".

Welcome to FlyerTalk, in any case :)

This.

You can't get gouged against your will.