If you’ve flown recently, you’d be surprised to hear that 20% of airline seats go unsold every year, costing airlines upwards of $170 billion in lost revenue.
Boohoo, you think. Give me back my legroom, you say.
But their losses could also mean a great deal for us.
Just launched, Air Ticket Arena is an app — available now on Android and later this month on iOS — that allows you to bid on unsold airline seats “for a fraction of the regular price” on short notice.
Once you have the app, you select where you want to go, your airline, travel dates and budgets, all up to 14 days in advance. If the airline and traveler request match up, a ticket is automatically issued around 48 hours before the flight.
If the numbers of ATA are to believed, you could save up to 70-90% over buying a seat the normal way, and there’s no cost to you until a match is made. That said, this seems to be more of a European/Asian/Dubai-friendly service for now (and the app seems to VERY buggy) but hey, you could find yourself over there this year, right?
(Photo via Delta News Hub/Flickr Creative Commons)
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