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How an Airline Ticketing Agent finds your tickets...

Have you ever wondered how an agent gets your airline tickets and why they cost what they do? Here is a little primer on the airline ticketing process, in a nutshell.

There are basically three ways for an agent to purchase tickets wholesale.

1. Buy blocks of seats at a wholesale rate and sell them as you can. This is risky because you may not sell them all and then you get stuck with a lot of tickets that nobody wants. We don't do that, but we do purchase by the second and thrid way.

2. Published fares. The airline sells the tickets to us for the face value of the ticket and pays us a commision from 0%-12(The general rule is that US airlines have stopped paying commission altogether, and Europeans do pay, but they are starting to follow the lead of the US). In this case you can buy the ticket from us for the same price that you can purchase it from the airline. This is what many travel agents do. Unless you sell a large volume of tickets to a certain area, the airlines will not offer you discounted fares.

3. Net fares. The airlines sells the tickets to us for a base fare and we can mark it up as much as we want as long as we pay the airline what they are selling it to us. I know that sounds good for us, but in reality we can only mark the tickets up enough so that they are less than the published fare, which is becoming increasingly difficult as many times, the published fare is less than than our net fare. When this is the case, I send you straight to the airline. Many agents will mark the tickets up $20-25, but my philosophy is that if I'm selling it to you for more than you could get it somewhere else, I'm not doing my job.

Every year the fares change so I have to search to find the airlines that have the deals of the year. This year it was a codeshare with American and Swiss. This works out well because American flies from so many US cities we have a lot of options(many of the net fares will not allow codeshares) and the Swiss taxes seem to be a lot lower, but you can read about taxes in my Why are the taxes so high page. These tickets are very hard to find and I'll explain the process so you can see why the computer sites like Expedia and Travelocity can't find them(or don't want to look?).

Next Page
Finding the American/Swiss codeshare

 

 



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