Since Canadian Airlines folded way back in 2001, the bulk of my domestic travel has been with Air Canada.

This is convenience more than love — I’d like to try Westjet or Porter Airlines and see whether their customer experience is as good as others claim, but each time I go to book a flight, Air Canada inevitably has a better fare price, departure time and/or route. When all things have been equal, my Aeroplan membership has kept me in Air Canada’s camp (even though the program is miserly now compared to what it was when I joined — but that’s fodder for another post).

I would say I’ve become fairly familiar with Air Canada’s website over the years, but last week I learned a (fairly obvious) trick that ended up saving me over $250.

Learning it did cost me two calls to customer service — one of 17 minutes that inexplicably ended in a dropped line and one of 23 minutes waiting for a live human — so I’m passing on what I’d learned.

Here’s what happened:

1. I opened my email inbox and saw the most recent Websaver, Air Canada’s email newsletter that advertises seat sales and other promotions:
2. One of the deals included 30 per cent off flights to Canadian and US cities for travel between August and December, including the city I’ve been e-stalking for a good seat sale for some time:
3. Below is the selection screen you would see if you clicked through to the Air Canada website directly from the email. Rather than bore you with my personal details, I’ve used Toronto-Halifax as an example. The ticking clock feature in the upper right helps to make sure you don’t miss the deal, reiterates the terms and allows Air Canada to introduce a sense of urgency to your transaction, making you a little more panicked and a little less rational. I like the green box feature that shows me at a glance which days are eligible. Notice, however, that the promotional code window down at the bottom is blank. If you click through to the site from this point, your navigation path from the promotional email is stored and the server therefore already has the code without you having to enter it, which may explain why I never paid the codes much mind before:
4. Here’s the usual ticket pricing screen where you can see your options, featuring Halifax for $109 in this example. On a side note, while I find this interface easy to use, I don’t understand why Air Canada forces you to purchase tickets before selecting a seat. It must make some operational sense to them, but as a consumer it is irritating to pay for a flight and then pay again for the privilege of guaranteeing that you are seated with your travel companions. But I digress:
5. The flight options looked good with a departure time I could live with and the price ($867 after taxes, fees and all the other incidentals; $708 in the Halifax example I’ve used here) was friendly to my wallet. But I had some family details to sort out before I could book.
6. Even in the age of cell phones and social media, some conversations take time. Talking to my family took most of the day. When everything was resolved and I went back to book my tickets, I opened a new tab in my browser window and went straight to the Air Canada website. Sadly, I was thinking of logistics and not the blog, so I didn’t take screen grabs from this point forward. Boo on me. By the time I decided to blog about this topic, the sale had ended; I haven’t been able to reproduce comparable shots.
7. I dumped in the destination, date and passenger information — but when I went to the fare listings, the flight I had seen that morning for $139 was now listed at $259. Factor in the taxes and fees and it netted out to over $250 more than I had wanted to spend.
8. I called Air Canada to see if they would honour the price I had seen earlier in the day (coincidentally, that lower price was available again the following morning by which point it was moot for me).
9. I was told that some faceless Air Canada controller sets the prices based on how well the aircraft has sold. It’s apparently impossible to speak to, let alone reason with, this person. The sales rep made this individual sound like an inaccessible god whose whimseys are not for mere mortals to comprehend. But after hearing my tale of family commitments and tight budgets, the sales rep took the time to make sure I was seeing the lowest fare — which I wasn’t — by walking me through the site.

How to Make Sure You’re Seeing the Lowest Possible Price

1. Go to aircanada.com.
2. Instead of dumping in your city of choice and travel dates, check the right-hand column for deals. Click through these links first if they apply to your travel plans. Other options include a) clicking through from promotional emails from your inbox or b) entering a promotional code to the field available on the landing page:
3. If there’s a sale running that involves taking a percentage off the ticket price, you’ll see the discount price applied to the ticket price after clicking through this route. If you just search for ticket prices without redirecting your browser through the discount section or entering a promotional code, the prices stay the same.
4. The FAQ section (which I had never bothered to read) suggests that you use this method when searching for cheaper flights, but doesn’t explain the mechanics. The onus is on you and me — the consumer — to figure it out:

Obvious? Yes — And That’s The Point

I suspect I am not alone in rushing through a transaction without paying attention to the details and thereby missing out on additional savings.

I am really grateful the sales rep took the time to explain instead of blowing me off. It was kind of her and if I had caught her name I would give her a shoutout for great customer service. But I do shudder to think how many other deals I thought I was getting in the past and actually missed because I didn’t understand this nuance about how Air Canada’s website works. Blarg.

I’ve played around with the site over the past week as various sales came and went. As far as I can tell, sales that don’t involve taking percentages off and include more generic wording — such as “U.S. Destinations on sale” — seem to give you the same prices no matter which route you take to the ticket listings, although individual flight options do fluctuate as seats are sold. If I’m wrong about that, please let me know.

But that percentage sale made a huge difference when I clicked through to tickets from the promotions window. I wish I’d taken screen grabs of my first experience — seeing the return leg for my flight drop from $139 a seat to $97 a seat once my browser had applied the sale price was literally the difference between taking a trip and staying home.

UPDATE: I have since found a comparable seat sale; see Air Canada’s promotional codes in action in the follow-up post.

I did notice URLs are substantially different depending on what browsing path you take. Whenever I came to ticket prices via a promotional path, the URL contained the words “Override Servlet”:

Here’s another sales-related URL that kept cropping up:

And I saw this one a lot, too:

It makes sense that the promotion would override the usual ticket price, changing the URL and allowing Air Canada to track the efficacy of its web sales and promotion codes. I’ll definitely be looking for that phrase in the URL the next time I’m looking up sale fares on the site.

Beyond making me grateful that I called to speak to a live human, the whole experience has made me more conscious of my browsing path when shopping for deals online.

Have you had similar experiences with air travel or other kinds of online promotions? Let me know about your experience in the comments.