Fare Talk - All Types of Airfares

What is an Airfare?

You don't always know what you are going to get when you purchase an airline ticket. Why is it that every person on a flight may have paid a different price to fly? Can you change or cancel your tickets, and if so, at what cost? The airlines have a seemingly secretive formula for constructing airfares. Knowing what types of airfares exist, and how they apply to your travel may not mean that airfares make sense, but you can at least make sense of them.

Simply put, an airfare is the price a passenger pays in order to travel by air. The types of fares, rules and restrictions, taxes, etc., are all components that complicate the price involved for a passenger to fly from one place to another.

Fares are most often based on one-way or round-trip travel. Fares may be published, unpublished and/or negotiated fares (corporations, or government agencies/organizations may have fares negotiated with an airline at a lower rate). Unpublished fares are also known as consolidated fares and are offered by consolidators and bucket shops.