MakeMyTrip

Today I happened to book air tickets after a long long time. We are planning to visit Himachal (again). I was all enthusiastic about planning the trip. But it looks like there are no low-fare airlines as they used to be.

We have a new airport in Himachal now, called "Dharamshala" (actually it's in Gaggal), so I was looking forward for trying it out. Only Air Deccan has flights on that route, and only makemytrip.com could give the connecting flight information. Yatra.com has Dharamshala in the destination list, but it ends up showing no results.

So I start booking with makemytrip for a return journey from Bangalore to Dharamshala. I selected the least available fare flights (we had to travel by air deccan, so there was hardly any choice there). Now the tricky part is, by the time it showed the final itinerary page, either departure or return or both ticket cost changed so drastically that it sounded unbelievable. e.g.

The fare for your return flight has changed. The fare has changed from Rs. 4948 to Rs. 6948 per adult. You can accept this fare, or click here to make another search.

I understand that, if I take long enough time to chose my flights, then the availability status would change, causing higher fare. But one thing I don't understand is that if start fresh search again, I can still see those low rates after say 5 mins. I tried this about 5-6 times. I also tried to click fast enough through pages (by blindly selecting first ever options it provided), and I still end up seeing fare changes in the last summary page, even though the whole process took less than a minute. It almost looked like one of those auction sites, where bidding amount changes every time you refresh the page.

I haven't seen this much fluctuation happening before. I wonder what's going on there! How can fares fluctuate so often? I think most of the people would find it too much of a hassle to search again from the beginning and end up accepting the new fares. MakeMyTrip is sure counting on that.

Is this going to be same if I call up their booking office? By the time I provide my details and credit card information, it will definitely take more than 5 mins. So am I going to hear the booking person say "Oh, by the way, the ticket cost has changed and now it's gonna be 2k more. Tell me within next 1 second if you want it or not."