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The alert said one price and the airline says another. Why?

Airline pricing changes by the minute and cheap fare buckets sell out. Our figure also includes estimated bag, seat and ground costs that you may not pick at checkout. Open the airline link straight away and compare the base fare first.

This is the most common question, and it usually has one of four answers. Take them in order.

  1. The fare moved. Airlines reprice constantly, and the cheapest bucket on a flight can be a handful of seats. Minutes matter on a genuinely good fare.
  2. You are comparing our true cost against the airline's headline fare. Ours has the bag, the seat and the transport to a further airport already in it. Compare like with like: the fare line on the journey page is the bit the airline quotes.
  3. The passenger count or the cabin differs. Two passengers, or a different bag choice, is a different price.
  4. The trip is two separate bookings. Then there is no single price anywhere - each ticket is priced on its own site, and the total is ours, not theirs.

What to do about it

  • Open the airline link from the alert immediately rather than later in the day. An alert fires within minutes of the price being seen.
  • Check the priced-at timestamp on the journey page. Anything hours old deserves a re-check before you plan around it.
  • If the airline's own base fare is far off ours and the timestamp is fresh, that is a bug and we want it. Tell us with the route and the dates.

We never hold, reserve or guarantee a price. That is the honest limit of what a price watcher can be.

Read next
Where do the prices come from?
Live flight searches, the same prices a booking site would show you, cached for a few hours so the same question does not cost a search twice.
Is the price I see the price I pay?
The figure Fare Sniper ranks on includes the fare, the bag, the seat and the ground transport to a further airport, because a 20 euro flight that costs 100 euro is not a 20 euro flight.
A price looks wrong. What should I do?
If a number fails the common sense test it is probably wrong, and we want to know. Here is what to check first and exactly what to send us.
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