Group Flights don’t necessarily mean group discounts.  The benefit of the group booking is that an airfare is agreed (i.e. contract based on algorithms of loads at request & time to departure etc), then secured with a seat deposit.  Then we have a long time to collect the money for the fare + get names per passport etc  i.e. paying the balance for the flight seats 2 months prior to departure.

So if we were to book these same seats with instant purchase, they would probably be cheaper than the group flight price. But if we booked them when we had all the group names/details the group flight price would be a lot less than instant purchase.

In situation, where there with quite a few students “breaking away” from the return flight, we need to book everyone as group participants so everyone gets the group price and benefits, and ‘break away” students give us their return flight request before we pay the balance on the flight price (we will inform you of the balance payment deadline).

Note that “break away” passengers will have to pay any difference (if any) in  airfare for the return trip.

This means that having “break away” students should not affect the airfare for other students.