I believe the last time I had the 6:35am departure, I got to the airport around 5 or 5:15am and I had plenty of time.

If you will be flying out of a small airport like Fargo, for example, please be sure to get there early as well. My family and I have always pushed the limits and got to the airport 50 minutes prior to departure and all the airport personnel were pissed at us (and everyone else because we all came late). Hey, there’s only 3 gates, can you blame us?

I am flying out of LAX and the flight is at 6:35 in the morning. If I arrive at 5:15, will I have enough time. I am told they shut down their window 45 minutes before flight departure.

They recommend 2 hours prior to departure and yes, it closes 45 minutes prior at the ticket counter.

Incidentally, the reason I’m reserving car seats in the first place is that I believe that Allegiant charges for them (as opposed to legacy airlines, which kept these free when they started charging for bags). Allegiant’s web site is somewhat vague on the matter, but I assume that in this case vague means $$$, which means it’s more cost effective to rent the car seats than to lug them.

As for price fluctuation, I don’t know for sure. They could just be putting in short term sales and taking them out. This is a new market for them, so there could be some experimentation going on. Please let us know how the trip goes!

I just had the pleasure of booking my first ever Allegiant flight, leaving LAX to XNA at the end of May. The web site is extremely annoying, not only do they check the extras by default but they also make it difficult to remove them. For example, there’s no button to removed a pre-assigned seat — I was looking all over the place and finally clicked on the “change seat” button as an experiment, just when my wife (looking over my shoulder) noticed a line saying something to the effect that in order to remove seats you need to change them first; indeed, clicking on the “change” button replaced it with a “remove” button. Talk about discoverability — it seems like the designers have read Jakob Nielsen’s web usability reports and intentionally worked against the recommendations.

Also, the web site says that for unassigned seats they make an effort to keep families together, but apparently their pre-assigned algorithm is not concerned with this: it put me in one place, my wife together with the older child in a separate row, and our 3-year-old in a different place altogether (they did have the age information by this point). Good thing I figured out how to remove the seat assignments :-)

But why am I complaining — $426 round-trip for 4 people, including taxes and fees and one checked bag, is about 1/3 of the price I could get on any other airline. And while XNA is about 3 hours from our final destination (compared to 2 hours from LIT), this is as far as I know the only non-stop flight from L.A. to anywhere in Arkansas. Even if it’s delayed, it should be better than the 5-hour wait for a connecting flight in last year’s trip (rainstorm in IAH).

Two final questions about Allegiant: 1. Why do their prices fluctuate so much? On Monday it was $49, Thursday it was $129, and Friday it was $29. I find it hard to believe it’s individual seat availability, because the same prices were showing for all the outgoing legs from LAX to XNA in late May and early June.

2. Any idea why my flight doesn’t appear on OAG? At least I can’t see it through the LAX portal.