I've spent the last week booking flights. A friend of mine is a travel agent, so I asked her to find the best flights for us. Usually I book direct through the airline, but this was a bit of a complicated itinerary, so benefited from the expertise.
However, we were both getting frustrated as the absolute best deals she could find were $150-$250 more expensive (per flight/ticket) than what I could get booking direct through the airline for the same flights. She was telling me that the airlines didn't give her access to those cheaper deals, and that the prices she was quoting were the lowest she could see in her system.
Why is this, and is there a way around this? In the end she just told me to book direct with the airline, telling me which flights to book. How can we make those deals visible to her?
For example, one of the airlines we looked at had three types of tickets available, "Value", "Comfort", "Premium" (or something to that effect). On the website the prices were something like
- Value $500
- Comfort $650
- Premium $1000
But the prices my friend had in her system were
- Value $650
- Comfort $800
- Premium $1200
Her "Value" ticket was the same price (within a couple of dollars) as the airline website's "Comfort" ticket which gave better options, more legroom, more luggage.
