Flights with booking.com - price seems too good to be true

alias no.9

Looking a flight options on Skyscanner on a busy weekend and there's an option listed for an AerLingus flight booked through booking.com that's coming in at around €100 while the price direct with AerLingus for the same flight is €400 so it seems too good to be true but Booking.com is a long established and reputable company.

Has anyone booked flights through them before and how did the price compare to booking direct?

Atlantic Dawn

Yes used them multiple times to book flight and hotel packages. What I find bad about them is usually the base price for the flights doesn't include hold luggage for long haul flights so you may have to pay for this seperately depending on the airline, have had occassions where half the flights had no extra charge and the others did at €50 or so a bag.

The difference in yours seems out of sync, is there a chance it's a codeshare flight and that another airline are actually operating it and so their price is cheaper for the same flight than Aer Lingus are charging?

alias no.9

The AerLingus service is definitely the same, Ryanair are the only other direct operators on the same route. Bagage is not a conern. Is it possible seats were block booked by some charter service and being sold through booking.com? Another company OY SRG Finland is mentioned in the T&Cs

It's travel for an event so if anything goes wrong I miss the event, think I'll look at going a day or two earlier.

munchkin_utd

I've had it happen a couple of times, once with Aer Lingus and once Lufthansa, that a rather expensive European flight was an amount cheaper through a 3rd party, but more like 400 down to 250 or 300 so still damn expensive. As said above, it was down to codeshare or some other quirk that you can get flights off the shared Amadeus system for an expensive price rather than very expensive direct from Aer Lingus or Lufthansa

On top of that, when looking at flights on skyscanner, often 3rd party services are quoting prices from a cache from a search days or weeks before, so that €100 offer may turn out to be a false alarm when you get as far as the confirm flight stage.

alias no.9

Went through as far as the payment page so confirmed the price, just paranoid that I'd turn up at the airport and be told that the booking didn't exist.

endofrainbow

The main problem with OTA's is that they do not have live pricing so what seems like a great price is not so great when they come back and say 'sorry this fare has increased'.

While Booking.com is well established, they only started booking flights 3/4 years ago and at that time were using GoToGate, a notoriously shonky agent that I wouldn't touch with someone else's bargepole.

Nothing surprises me now

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120298042#Comment_120298042

I looked at Aer Lingus for flights to Canaries in March but quite expensive. Looked at Love holidays site and got accommodation and Aer Lingus flights for same date, flights were so much cheaper, went ahead, booked and received confirmation email back from AL confirming flights. I presume if you go through Booking.com you'll receive email from AL confirming the flights too which will reassure you all is in order.

liamda

Book direct to be certain of your flight you cannot rely on Booking.com if anything goes wrong, See reviews https://ie.trustpilot.com/review/www.booking.com

Dr. Nick

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120320377#Comment_120320377

Oh dear. They should stick to the hotels.