Hi eevie,

It's just how the budget airlines work!

You pay your money and take your choice. However, I would be very surprised if your tickets disappeared before you could book the remainder.

There are a number of similar threads on the forum if you want a different perspective.

not sure if this is the same principle as flythomascook, last year a few of my friends were going to turkey and were booking on same flight but each family paying separately every time 1 family booked their flights the next family had to pay around £10 each more !!! i watched this happen over the week, very strange so not sure what will happen, good luck

Hi eevie .... with Ryanair, you can check availability of up to 25 seats. If you check first of all that there are at least 20-25 seats available, then it is unlikely (but not impossible) that all those seats will be snapped up while you process two bookings for a total of five seats. If there are 10 or fewer seats available, the risk is obviously increased.

However, there is no guarantee either that after booking the first three seats, the price for the remaining two seats will remain unchanged.

As luddendenturk mentions, there are previous similar threads on this subject, for one of those please click here.

David

To be honest this happened to me with Aer Lingus and whats more than likely happened here is that there are only say three or 4 seats left at the cheaper price the rest are more expensive. so i dont think that the seats arent there its more likely that they are just at different prices. Try 4 seats and see if they are still 39.99.

if all else fails how about ringing up the call centre and pretending you want to book by phone for all 5 people. get the price and then at least you ll know the seats are there

yes will work ,did the same in January with thomson

but ..theres always a but isnt there !!
dont forget if paying by credit card you will get charged per transaction

Hi

Thanks for the advice. Just to let you know........

I have just booked, got 3 tickets at the lower price and then booked 2 more which were the higher price. Credit card fee was 3.50 per ticket, so it made no difference booking separately. But I saved £30 by doing it in 2 transactions.

Glad it worked well . I did this last year with ryanair. we needed 6 seats and i booked 5 at the cheap fare of around £35 each and then 1 at £70.

lyn

The majority of low cost and charter airlines use openskies as their main reservation system. For airlines who use this system, fares are priced in buckets, which usually starts off at the "C" bucket (the lowest prices) and works its way through the alphabet.

Each bucket has an allocated amount of seats pre-loaded. So, if there are only 2 seats left in "C" bucket and you require 3 seats, you will have to pay 3 x "D" bucket seats.

The only way that you can avoid paying 3 x "D" buckets is by booking the last two seats on "C" then making a seperate booking for 1 passenger on the next bucket up.

The only way for the public to tell how many seats are left in the cheapest available bucket, is to work out if there is an increase in the basic adult fare when you enter more than one passnger into the search criteria.