Sunday, June 27, 2010

Purchasing plane ticket

I've been trying to figure out when the best time to purchase a plane ticket on orbitz.com is.
It's been quite a confusing process, purchasing a plane ticket has got to be one of the least straight forward things I have ever tried to acquire.
Each day brings slightly different pricing, and occasionally when I click on a price I want to explore it has disappeared.
Another very annoying thing is price disclosure. Orbitz seems to at least try, but some flights require the archaic method of mailing me the tickets on paper. This ends up adding about $30 to the total package. Not only does this make me mad when I have already settled on a price, but how does it benefit the airline? They now have to go through the work of mailing out a set of tickets, which is extra overhead, when they already have a better system in place; and they have to deal with tickets getting lost in the mail.
Also it is hard to shop around and compare prices on other ticket sites with the pricing changing so quickly, I might come back to my good deal only to find it gone.

1 comment:

Jeremy said...

It turns out that shortly after purchasing the tickets Orbitz sent me an email saying the airline wouldn't allow paper tickets and that it would have to give me e-tickets instead. The email also said I would be refunded the money for the paper tickets.
I'm glad it worked out, but that seems like a round about and odd way of getting what was needed.