I feel as though I just escaped a scam.
I went along to my local travel agent to book a ticket to New York under the current travel fair cheap ticket week. Luckily for me, before I went, I checked how much a cheapest normal economy fare would be, booked on a normal day outside of the travel fair.
There are three levels of tickets on cheap offer at the travel fair. The “L” fare to NY is indeed cheap. If you could get it, you’d save something like $RM 922. Not bad. The catch is that there are very few flights where that fare is offered (and I wouldn’t mind betting only a few seats on each of those very few flights.) Unhappily, none of the dates suited me.
But never mind, there are two other levels of “cheap” tickets on offer for the duration of the fair.
But – caveat emptor – on the NY route at least, these other levels of so-called “cheap” fares are MORE expensive than the normal lowest level of economy fare.
The girl in the travel agency was taken aback when I pointed this out to her. She went to double check, and came back baffled. It really was so. So beware. Cheap travel fairs can be a way to pay more. Malaysia Boleh!
I agree entirely. Having spent a few hours ploughing through the MAS www to try and get cheap flights to London, I then tried S’pore airlines and found their flights are about RM260 cheaper than MAS promotion fares. And I much prefer to fly with SQ, even though it takes longer via S’pore.
I can’t work out the class codes of L, Q etc. MAS told me it doesn’t matter which day of the week you fly, all fares are the same. However when I tried a Fri it was RM550 more expensive than going on a Thur !
However after much persistence I did manage to get an MAS L fare for cheaper than SQ !
Sympathies Liz. But at least you had some luck at the end. I have spent most of the day trying to make an online booking, after discovering that it was some RM550 cheaper than doing it thru a travel agent or the toll free number. At first it wouldn’t accept my passport details. I finally managed to understand how to get around that glitch in their programming (with the help of a phone call to their internet dept). But then after that all my attempts to book have been rejected without reason. Sigh.
I found the internet to be exactly the same price or else more expensive than MAS office. I didn’t try the phone line, thought it would be jammed.
I’ve had problems with booking on MAS internet in the past, especially the end stage when it comes to the payment. So this time I went straight to KL Sentral where I had the choice of MAS office or 3 travel agents and there were no queues at any of them. And the girl was willing to explain the different fare classes and conditions etc.