If cheap travel, cheap fares, cheap airfare, particularly finding the least expensive cheap airplane tickets is your goal, then you will be best served by shopping for airfare one passenger at a time. This is the case even when you are planning a trip with family, a group of friends, even if there are only two of you.
Airline reservation systems require identical prices for all tickets on a single reservation or transaction even where there are cheaper seats available for fewer than everyone in the group.
No airline charges the same price for every economy seat on a plane. There tend to be as many as 10 different price points on each flight in coach. The difference in coach ticket prices is often considerable.
When there are only a few, or even one ticket remaining at the cheapest price, shoppers who request prices for multiple passengers will be quoted the most expensive price for the final traveler in the group.
That first cheap ticket can be purchased separately at a lower price, but when included in a group price it is often quoted at a higher price. A group of four people could literally be able to purchase tickets at four different prices if available, but when grouped together only the highest price will be offered for all four tickets.
If the individual ticket price is the same as the group price that is quoted, then there is no reason not to purchase the group price. However, if one or more tickets is quoted at a lower price than the group price, you should break your purchase into different groups in order to take advantage of lower prices.
The one risk you take in doing this is that a plane only has a limited number of seats and you risk the possibility of some members of your group having to fly separately. If minors (i.e., children) are part of your group, your best bet is to pair an adult with each child so that you do not inadvertently find that you end up with a child having to fly on his or her own.
By first shopping individual ticket prices you can save as much as a couple of hundred dollars. This is particularly true if you shop for flights early which is when airlines are trying to determine if demand for a given flight matches past history. If not, they may price a few tickets much cheaper to stimulate demand.
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