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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

So, the answer is: "it's complicated"

You can get a cheaper ticket with an agent than with an airline but this would be a ticket attached to certain conditions (for example, it can only be sold together with a hotel room)

Another possibility is that you do a search and find it per X and then go to an agent and they find it cheaper but because they know how to look around your dates and possibilities you might not know (connection alternatives, etc).

But to be fair, even if it's a little more expensive I prefer the peace of mind of dealing with one vendor instead of two vendors if anything happens.

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> You can get a cheaper ticket with an agent than with an airline but this would be a ticket attached to certain conditions (for example, it can only be sold together with a hotel room)

Ticket pricing is unpredictable and really depends on your location and route.

A few times I used Expedia instead of the airline, and it was both cheaper and allowed flexible total unconditional cancellation within a short time after buying.

Quite helpful when you need to arrange multiple bookings, hotels, etc. on short notice with changing availability. Plus there’s that time I literally bought a same day ticket just to enter HKIA and meet arriving friend (a ticket was required due to protests). Returned it as soon as I passed the guards. With that low-cost airline it wouldn’t be possible directly, and even if somehow it was the ordinary refund would’ve taken days. (After I saw their ticket verification procedures I realized a even a well-done fake might have sufficed, but you don’t want to leave stuff like that to chance.)

That said, in some countries I have never seen agents offer better options than airlines.

The problem is that you're not dealing with one vendor though: you're actually dealing with N+1, where the +1 is just an opaque intermediary to the N services it's brokering/reselling.

When there are no issues, this works fine.

If there are issues? Be prepared to do the customer service tango, and hope that the person at check-in understands how $intermediary actually resells their stuff and knows the right knobs to twiddle, because otherwise you're shit outta luck.

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