Let*s start with an explanation of Online Airfares. It is important to note that in
airline business, as well as with most any another business enterprise, there are three distinct tiers of sellers in marketplace. First of course is major domestic and international airline carriers.
Next, you will find airfare wholesalers, who are often referred to as consolidators. The consolidator buys empty seats from airline, and they resell those seats to travel resellers.
Unless you buy a seat on a flight directly from airline, then you are often buying from a travel reseller, which sometimes takes form of your local, neighborhood travel agent.
Of course, airline would prefer to sell you your seat directly, because they will get to keep all of markup for themselves, thereby increasing their profit margins. But system has been set up in this way to assure airline that they will be able to fill all of their seats.
Let*s face it, empty seats generate zero revenue. The airlines figure that they would rather discount some seats than to fly half full. When airlines sell seats to consolidators, they often do so for as much as 70% of off regular published airfare prices! Since discounts are so deep, there are a lot of consolidators willing to jump in and sell seats for airlines. Imagine that.
This means that person in seat 2B might have actually paid twice as much for his ticket as did person in seat 2C! This is because person in seat 2C was willing to shop around for a better price, whereas person in seat 2B just called airline and bought his ticket at regular rate.
It actually happens everyday where a shopper will find a ticket for half of what they would expect to pay for ticket, but by time they get to checkout screen, ticket has already been sold. In some cases, shopper had chance to buy directly from consolidator instead of from reseller/agent who is trying to beat them to punch.
This is also reason that if you shop for an airline ticket online, you might find same ticket at five different sites at five different prices. Let*s face it, all of consolidators have their own defined markup on tickets they sell, and each of resellers/agents also have their own markup on your ticket. Everyone needs to make a profit, right?
