Posted 6 days ago

EasyJet price increase while booking

I have never flown EasyJet before, but they had the best times for a trip that I need to make. I put in all the details and was about to pay, then the price (for 2 of us) has suddenly gone up by £50. The flight was a third empty when they asked if you wanted to pay for seats.

Is this a normal ocurrance?
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  1. sm9690's avatar
    The flight was a third empty when they asked if you wanted to pay for seats.

    That's completely irrelevant, loads of people don't pay for seating and get allocated seats at check-in for free
    wpj's avatar
    Author
    Yes, I didn't pay; I was commenting that the flight wasn't overly full ("inventory" must be seats) to justify an increase.
  2. Misslovely's avatar
    All airlines do this if there’s lots of you going and booking the seats. I might go cheaper later or might not at all
    Gollywood's avatar
    You're cheap
  3. Russ2626's avatar
    It's a really scummy practice but I've had this before (with Ryanair and Tui). Not only did they increase the price while booking but I then had to restart the whole booking process. They generally increase the price of seats as the flight fills up so someone probably booked just before you did. (edited)
    bozo007's avatar
    If there is a sale or tickets are cheap, there will be many on the website looking to buy. This is no different than an item going out of stock before you pay for it - in this case, it is the fare bucket going OOS. Usually, the cheapest tickets are a small fraction of the seats on the flight.
  4. Gollywood's avatar
    Very normal.
  5. plebbygiraffe's avatar
    Very normal indeed. For two reasons, pricing is based on demand and whilst you may say it is a third empty, that's just another way of saying it is two-thirds full. Even 1 seat sold is demand. It will vary from completely empty to completely full as well as how close you are to departure.

    The second factor is a bit of a technical one, and that is that a live lookup of pricing might take a moment to check so in order to provide results as quickly as possible to users some systems cache information for a while, and only do the live check when you proceed to the next step. So search results might have pricing that's updated say every half hour, or every hour that type of thing and if a user does proceed to the next step and discovers a new live price it will update that cache.

    So for most people it'll be a correct figure, but someone will encounter a price change at some point.
  6. Chiptivo's avatar
    Stick to Ryanair if you want budget flights. Never had a problem with them if you stick to their rules.
    harrythefish's avatar
    Just took the suitcase that Ryanair destroyed to the tip at the weekend. We'd planned to take it as cabin luggage as the rules allowed it. While boarding the steps, staff snatched the case and insisted it went in the hold. Never experienced that before. That was 4-5 years ago but we're clearing out clutter.

    The Mrs and I haven't flown Ryanair once since. It's been the somewhat more predictable easyJet every time.
  7. jinkssick's avatar
    This is usual. use incognito mode. as it tracks with cookies and they cheekily increase the price.
    wpj's avatar
    Author
    I tried different computes and VPN, but it is now this elevated price. There were other fares which said how many they had left at the quoted price, which is fine. When I was booking it didn't say this at all.
  8. wpj's avatar
    Author
    I finally went BA as it was cheaper than the "low cost" carriers when cabin baggage was added!
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