Airline madness!

Shelley must be rubbing off on me for my blog titles - I think half of hers are "something something something madness" :)

I really don't understand how the airlines set prices, book (and overbook!) flights, etc. To me, it sure seems like a flight is a flight is a flight, and that every ticket on a given flight should cost the same price - it costs $x amount to run flight y, and there are n passengers. OK so I'm not an economist, and it's probably a bit more complicated than that...but the way it works is just crazy. My recent example:

A couple of weeks ago Erin, through his HR department, had them book his Las Vegas trip flights and hotel for the conference he was attending for work. We had decided to make a vacation out of the trip, so Erin had them extended a couple days before and after the conference - and we'd pay for the extra days on the room. Still a good deal for us because his flight and 3 nights at the Mirage were all paid for.

They booked his flights but did not get back to him right away with the flight information - which I wanted because I wanted to book the same flights for myself. I was getting concerned because prices tend to go up as it gets closer to the date you want to book. He finally got his flight info - outgoing flight from MSP at 7am on the start date, return flight from Vegas at 2:20pm on the end date. I went right to the web site and chose those flights, and found the cost to be $572. Doing a little more looking, if I took the same outgoing flight but chose a return flight at 12:00pm instead of 2:20pm, it was $350. So for a flight on the same day 2 hours earlier it was $200 cheaper. Crazy #1. I wanted to make sure that was ok with Erin - that I might have to return on a different flight than him. By the time I got home and talked to him about it, and tried booking again, the prices had changed so that they were now both $572. Crazy #2. I went ahead and booked for fear that the costs would go up even more, and went to bed kind of frustrated.

In the morning, out of curiousity (masochism?) I went out to the booking web page again and just looked to see whta the flights and prices were. BOTH flights were now $350. I was very frustrated and started looking around for numbers to call to see if I could get the lower price or at least complain - not confident of either. I stumbled onto a "cancel reservation" option...but was leary of that because almost always there are huge fees to cancelling or changing. Crazy #3. In this case, you are allowed to cancel within 24 hours of purchase for a full refund. Hooray! So I cancelled, and re-booked for $200 less, for the flight I wanted in the first place. Crazy #4.

Now, WHY would a flight be one price at 8PM one night and be $200 less the next day at 8AM? This makes no logical or economic sense...anyway, morals of the story are book early, or (apparently) book often.