A couple of weeks ago my niece enlisted my help to find a fare for herself and her husband to go in economy to Durban from Dublin in October to visit her uncle. She had gone through ebookers and the best she had come out with was with Air France at €2695 for the two of them. She felt she could do better than that but didn't know where to look.
Never one to resist a challenge like that I set to and at the same time suggested she ring around the local travel agents for a quote. I was a little suspicious of the Air France fare as I am aware that travel agents regularly push different airlines, no doubt at a fee, as her cousin who was also Durban bound had been given the best price by the local travel agent in Dublin for Air France and had bought a fare which I felt at the time could be bettered. They all offered Air France.
My first port of call was ebookers.ie (doesn't matter which ebookers site you go onto, it always defaults to the Irish site) and sure enough it was coming up with the Air France fare. What was shocking though was the alternative fares they were coming in with. SAA was €2666per person/€5333 for two; there was no mention of BA and incredibly VS was coming in at a whopping €5717 per person/€11434 for two!! [:0] The website staed that all fares were in economy but when I went into the VS website there was no way I could even raise that fare in J even with the currency converter. To say I was shocked is an understatement and I feel a letter to the Director of Consumer Affairs is in order.
Travelocity couldn't even come up with a fare for that routing!
BA, God bless them, came up with a fare of €2400 approx for the two of them and what I do like about the BA website is it will give fares in Euro.
I have to admit that I didn't try VS simply because it would have entailed a phone call and having got the lowest LHR-JNB fare I didn't think it was going to better BA which was currently coming out the cheapest.
A couple more Irish sites were throwing up the Air France option and my last remaining hope was Expedia and here I struck gold! It came up with exactly the same flights as the BA website but came in just under the €2000 mark for the two of them. Bingo! I emailed my niece with the information and off she went!
Sorry, I should say that at this point I have only ever used Expedia for hotels and then not recently. I did however tell her to click for a non-UK credit card and left her off to do the booking. She was thrilled with the price for her routing DUB-LHR-JNB-DUR and then ran into a problem!! The site wouldn't accept the booking. I gave her the customer service number in the UK which she called. The problem was that they would not send tickets to the Republic of Ireland. Fortunately she was able to sort the problem out immediately by giving her friend's address in London to which the tickets will be mailed but it does beg the question as to why they offered the fare in the first place from Ireland if they weren't going to send the tickets there. [?]
Never one to resist a challenge like that I set to and at the same time suggested she ring around the local travel agents for a quote. I was a little suspicious of the Air France fare as I am aware that travel agents regularly push different airlines, no doubt at a fee, as her cousin who was also Durban bound had been given the best price by the local travel agent in Dublin for Air France and had bought a fare which I felt at the time could be bettered. They all offered Air France.
My first port of call was ebookers.ie (doesn't matter which ebookers site you go onto, it always defaults to the Irish site) and sure enough it was coming up with the Air France fare. What was shocking though was the alternative fares they were coming in with. SAA was €2666per person/€5333 for two; there was no mention of BA and incredibly VS was coming in at a whopping €5717 per person/€11434 for two!! [:0] The website staed that all fares were in economy but when I went into the VS website there was no way I could even raise that fare in J even with the currency converter. To say I was shocked is an understatement and I feel a letter to the Director of Consumer Affairs is in order.
Travelocity couldn't even come up with a fare for that routing!
BA, God bless them, came up with a fare of €2400 approx for the two of them and what I do like about the BA website is it will give fares in Euro.
I have to admit that I didn't try VS simply because it would have entailed a phone call and having got the lowest LHR-JNB fare I didn't think it was going to better BA which was currently coming out the cheapest.
A couple more Irish sites were throwing up the Air France option and my last remaining hope was Expedia and here I struck gold! It came up with exactly the same flights as the BA website but came in just under the €2000 mark for the two of them. Bingo! I emailed my niece with the information and off she went!
Sorry, I should say that at this point I have only ever used Expedia for hotels and then not recently. I did however tell her to click for a non-UK credit card and left her off to do the booking. She was thrilled with the price for her routing DUB-LHR-JNB-DUR and then ran into a problem!! The site wouldn't accept the booking. I gave her the customer service number in the UK which she called. The problem was that they would not send tickets to the Republic of Ireland. Fortunately she was able to sort the problem out immediately by giving her friend's address in London to which the tickets will be mailed but it does beg the question as to why they offered the fare in the first place from Ireland if they weren't going to send the tickets there. [?]
