As I think a lot of people have discovered, getting from the West Coast to Europe this summer--particularly at peak times--is a real challenge. I have to travel the week just before Labor Day--the combination of the US holiday and the flight reductions meant that many of the usual options were crazy expensive or not showing on booking sites at all. After a couple of hours of scouring sites (and after my notification emails that I set up at kayak and the like had not supplied me with any flights under my hoped for price point in the past few weeks) I bit the bullet and booked flights for the two of us. I was a bit anxious to get the confirming email, because the site claimed that the tickets were the last two at that price point.
So guess what? This morning our credit card fraud division called to let us know that somebody had booked two pricy tickets to Europe but that they had helpfully declined to put the charges through and were calling to see if the cards should be cancelled. I told them that the charges were fine. But in the meantime, the tickets I thought we had bought were cancelled by the airline for non-payment. Going back online, the same flights are now 300 dollars apiece more than I paid (or thought I paid!) the night before. Grrrr!!!
Moral of the story. Contact your credit card before making a large airline ticket purchase and let them know that it is coming. Otherwise they might decline to honor it--thinking they are protecting from a fraudulent purchase--only to end up with you losing out on a good airfare.