Airlines
The media was full of stories last week about the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) requirement that advertised airfares include all taxes and fees, which goes into effect Jan. 26. But most stories missed the detail that promoting each-way fares “based on a required round-trip purchase” will still be allowed.
This means that a $220 fare you see advertised may not be the actual final price, after all — despite DOT’s much trumpeted pursuit of transparency and consumer protection. In its ruling last April that finalized the new requirements, it only demanded that the fine print be more prominent.
“The department is codifying existing enforcement policy, allowing sellers of air transportation to advertise an each-way price that is contingent on a round-trip ticket purchase, so long as the round-trip purchase requirement is clearly and conspicuously disclosed in a location that is prominent and proximate to the advertised fare,” the final ruling said.
I suppose it’s easy enough to double $220 and quickly arrive at the $440 round-trip price, if there is a notation next to the fare that a round trip is mandatory. But at the same time, isn’t it even easier to just put $440 instead of half that amount plus the fine print?
DOT said that its ruling “allows sellers of air transportation to be flexible in the way they advertise round-trip fares while still requiring all pertinent disclosures to consumers.”
Who are we kidding? The only reason airlines use this marketing ploy is to mislead and manipulate customers. They can easily prove me wrong by ending the practice.
“While the department understands that some consumers would prefer the full round-trip price to be displayed, the department has not found that the current regime has led to consumer confusion or deception, and it does permit certain types of advertising that are beneficial,” DOT said.
I’ve written about this issue several times, and it’s hard for me to see anything “beneficial” in false each-way fare advertising — for consumers, that is. I have no trouble seeing how this practice benefits airlines. As I’ve pointed out before, many airlines do advertise actual round-trip fares.
There is nothing wrong, of course, with promoting one-way fares that can indeed be purchased as such, without the round-trip requirement.
DOT has taken important steps to address false fare advertising — including fines on carriers that break the rules — but there is much more to be desired if it’s really serious about protecting consumers.
On a somewhat different note, the new rules also increase the denied-boarding compensation airlines are required to offer passengers who are left behind because their flight was oversold. Carriers usually try to entice volunteers with travel vouchers, but if that fails, they must give the affected customers cash or a check.
If such travelers’ new flights delay arrival at their final destination between 1 and 2 hours for domestic flights and between 1 and 4 hours for international ones, the compensation must be 200 percent of the one-way fare or $650, whichever is lower. For longer delays, the numbers go up to 400 percent of the fare or $1,300.
Airlines are exempt from these rules if the denied boarding is due to substituting the scheduled aircraft with a smaller plane, or if the plane has fewer than 30 seats. The rules don’t apply to international flights inbound to the United States, though the European Commission has even stricter rules for flights originating in the European Union.
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How do you know that an airline agent is trying to charge you much more than necessary to change a ticket? Two agents attempted that on me just yesterday, but they quickly realized they were messing with the wrong guy and retreated from their positions. The difference was thousands of dollars.
In my book, I explain why it helps to know what exactly you want before calling an airline, and more importantly, to know the outcome of an agent’s actions. I never trust agents to tell me how much I need to pay for anything — I call them simply to accomplish something I can’t do online.
A couple of months ago, I issued a Business Class ticket for a client who flew the outbound portion but had to cancel the return. I called the airline to take him off that flight and said I wasn’t ready to rebook yet but would call back when I was. The agent said, fine, call us then.
That’s what I did yesterday, but the agent I got was told by the rate desk that the new flight had to be booked at the same time the original segment was canceled — in other words, it was too late. That was the biggest claptrap I’d heard in a long time, so I hung up. After all, what was the alternative? Buying a new ticket?
I immediately called again to speak to another agent, but in the one minute that took, the first agent had managed to notate the record that changes weren’t allowed. As calm as I try to stay with reservations on the phone, spiteful agents like that one annoy me hugely. Naturally, I asked for a supervisor to make my case that the rate-desk person was wrong.
First, even if the change had to be made at the same time as the original cancellation, I should have been informed of that when I made the cancellation, if that would leave the ticket with no value — not when it was too late.
Second, the fare rules said the following: “Original reservations are cancelled prior to the original scheduled flight and the new intended travel is scheduled.” If the authors of that sentence meant that both actions had to be completed at the same time, they would have put “and the new intended travel is scheduled” before the words “prior to the original scheduled flight.” In that case, both actions would have been covered by “prior to…” — as I understand it here, the first action does need to take place “prior to…,” but not the second.
The supervisor didn’t even argue with me. She deleted the spiteful notes and authorized the change.
But the rate desk’s shenanigans were far from over. The original Z booking class wasn’t eligible for an upgrade to First Class, which was available on the new flight and my client wanted it, so he had to buy up to the higher D class. I’d looked at the airline’s tariff and determined that the difference in fare would be about $1,000.
However, the rate desk wanted to charge $4,000. Customers don’t have access to the rate desk, so I had to reason with a reservation agent. I pointed out what I’d seen on the tariff and explained that the rate desk wanted to charge a one-way D fare, but this was a round-trip ticket, and they should be charing half of the lower round-trip D fare.
The agent suggested that perhaps the lower D fare was not combinable with the Z fare on the already flown outbound flight. I had an answer to that, too: The last three letters of both fare-basis codes were the same, so they were indeed combinable. I could also prove that by booking a new reservation in Z class on the outbound and D class on the return.
She went back to the rate desk and quickly returned with the news that I was right and the fare difference would be about $1,000.
Was this incompetence or did they try to take me for a ride? I don’t know — what I do know is that something that should have taken 10 minutes took instead more than an hour to accomplish.
So make sure you do your homework and don’t trust agents, even if they tell you that they have 20 years of experience.
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The owners of FareCompare.com have apparently decided to destroy what used to be one of the most useful websites for consumer travel. Its best features were removed last weekend, and many of the remaining ones are not working properly. Talk about fixing something that wasn’t broken.
For a couple of years, FareCompare has been talking about catering more to the airline industry than consumers, proposing a system to track mistake fares and alert carriers, so they can correct them. The company has also stepped up advertising — both on the site and in e-mail messages.
Could it be that it feels pressure to make it more difficult for consumers to find better deals and spend less money on air travel?
In both my book and my classes, I stress the importance of monitoring fares and learning when a low fare is published — regardless of travel dates and seat availability — so you can take advantage of it before it disappears. As I say, I want to know what’s possible, and then I’ll do whatever I can to get the best price. That was one of FareCompare’s main strengths.
You could program your account — in the “My Trips” section — to keep track of various city-pairs, specify an airline, if you like, and request e-mail alerts every time a new fare on a certain route was filed. When you logged in, all your saved routes appeared on the same page, showing the current lowest fares, along with their place on an airline’s tariff, and the last several lowest filings on that route for comparison. You could also rearrange the city-pairs by price or other criteria.
The “My Trips” section is still there, but most of its previous functions no longer exist. You can’t rearrange the routes, you can’t specify an airline, you don’t see any data from the tariff, such as fare basis codes and valid dates, and you don’t get historical data for comparison. In fact, as I write this, all my 65 saved routes say that a “price is not currently available.”
There have been problems with e-mail alerts for years, but now they seem to have multiplied — the problems, not the alerts.
Finally, FareCompare was great at giving us idea for trips. For example, if you wanted to get away for a long weekend, you could see a list of destinations either by total price or price per mile. However, the page that used to show how far you could fly for the least amount of money — also known as the FlyerTalk page and incredibly useful to leisure travelers — has been removed. There is a message that a new version is “coming soon,” but no one knows why the old version was taken down before the replacement was ready.
There are already frustrated travelers who have posted in two threads on FlyerTalk. Some of them note the conspicuous silence of FareCompare, which actually started one of the threads in 2008.
To be fair, the site does have a map showing fares from any given city to any destination in the world, but I have four problems with it: First, it’s very difficult to use graphically, because many fares appear on top of each other due to the cities’ proximity. Second, you have to specify a month in which you want to travel, which leaves out many fares. Third, the tool that specifies an airline isn’t working. Fourth and most important, some fares are simply wrong.
FareCompare is a free site, and I’m sure some people think we have no right to criticize it or have demands. But I think there is rarely a truly “free” site anymore. We pay for using it one way or another — if not with a subscription fee, perhaps by enduring various ads. And who knows where our e-mail addresses end up?
If FareCompare doesn’t restore its most useful tools, it would be handing AirfareWatchdog.com a great opportunity to fill a much-needed void.
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While most U.S. airlines have learned to be relatively honest with their best customers, many of their foreign peers have not yet realized that travelers are not as stupid as to fall for their PR spin and questionable practices.
It’s time for those carriers to wake up to the fact that it’s the end of 2011, and much in the airline industry is rather transparent to those of us who pay attention. Trying to persuade customers that bad news is actually good may be an essential PR trick, but in today’s hyper-connected world, it’s not hard to figure out someone’s true intentions.
Among the airlines still using the old playbook is British Airways, which is surprising for such a major and quite good global carrier. Last month, it drastically devalued its award redemption chart, but it tried to present that negative change as a positive one.
The clue came with the usage of the world “revitalizing” to describe the changes to the carrier’s frequent-flier program, Executive Club. At least they steered clear of “enhancement,” which is what many U.S. carriers used in the past, inviting much derision from frequent fliers.
British Airways announced a few weeks before the changes took effect that they were coming, but what those changes actually were going to be remained a secret until the very day they were implemented. That move showed gross disrespect for the company’s best customers who deserved much better for their loyalty.
In contrast, many U.S. airlines and hotel companies publish their new charts, as well as other program changes, months in advance. One recent exception was Delta Airlines, which didn’t really have an official global chart for more than a year, until it finally published one in February, effective immediately — actually, much of it was already in use unofficially.
Apparently, British Airways was afraid that many Executive Club members would rush to burn their miles before the last change — after all, there were plenty of miles on its books, partly thanks to its giving away 100,000 miles as a credit-card sign-up bonus. So it said that the number of award miles required for “97 percent of our routes” will stay the same or even go down.
In fact, that turned out to be false. In an attempt to save face when the new chart came out, the airline said it had meant 97 percent of the nonstop routes out of London.
While some of those nonstop routes have indeed become cheaper, there are many Executive Club members outside London who earned their miles hoping to use them for trips to cities other than London. Unfortunately, they are the big losers — the increases in those cases can be over 80 percent. Substantial premiums have been added to connecting and partner flights across the board.
Those changes, along with the huge amounts British Airways charges in taxes and fees on award tickets, have drastically devalued its miles. Just this week, I booked award tickets to Asia for two clients, and I really wanted to help them burn their British Airways miles. However, that particular award had almost doubled in price, and the taxes were over $1,200 per person. So I booked with another airline for nearly half the miles and $85 in taxes.
British Airways in certainly not alone in thinking that customers are stupid. Air Canada quietly started charging fuel surcharges on some partner award tickets earlier this fall. Did it hope no one would notice that they were asked to pay hundreds of dollars more than before? Finally, after Air Canada was exposed on various blogs, it admitted what it was doing and said that even more partner flights would be included in the new program.
And then there is the scandalous behavior of the United Arab Emirates’ Etihad Airways last month.
For two days in October, it advertised a First Class fare from Spain to Australia on its website for less than 400 euro. According to Spanish media reports, about 300 people bought tickets. The first of them traveled 10 days later, when an agent in Brussels noticed the fare and alerted the appropriate department. It was then determined that the fare was a mistake, and the passenger was downgraded to coach without any compensation. The rest of the tickets were canceled.
I’ve written about mistake fares before, but the issue here is not whether Etihad was wrong not to honor the tickets. I said scandalous because of a letter the airline sent to the passengers who decided to put up a fight and wanted to defend their rights through the media.
Etihad hired a law firm in Spain that in no uncertain terms threatened those customers in writing with litigation, if they dared to go to the media. The last time I checked, Spain was a democracy with freedom of speech, and the United Arab Emirates was something quite different. I don’t believe anything has changed since.
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North American airfares are now published four times a day during the week, after the Airline Tariff Publishing Company (ATPCO) added earlier this month a filing feed at 4 p.m. Eastern time to the already-existing feeds at 10 a.m., 1 p.m. and 8 p.m.
This means that, at any of those times, a certain fare can be put on the market, changed or pulled off the market. It also means that a fare’s entire lifespan can be as short as three hours.
The 4 p.m. feed had been planned for months, as I wrote in my book “Decoding Air Travel.” Although the airlines update their data 24 hours a day, ATPCO sends that data out to Global Distribution Systems (GDS), which are used by airlines and travel agencies to book flights, four times a day during the week. On weekends, there is only one feed at 5 p.m. ET.
“ATPCO started this new time for the U.S. and Canadian subscription data feed on Oct. 3,” said Jay Brawley, the company’s director of customer marketing. “The weekend feed remains the same.”
Located near Washington Dulles International Airport, ATPCO is owned by 16 of the world’s largest carriers and the Federal Express Corp. Its only and much smaller competitor is SITA, which publishes some fares in Europe, Africa and Asia.
ATPCO sends out feeds with international fares every hour, except for several hours on Saturday night, Brawley said. Discounted international fares typically stay on the market longer than discounted U.S. domestic fares — sometimes for weeks.
The official filing feeds don’t exclude the possibility that a fare may be changed or removed at other times on a booking source directly controlled by the airline, such as its website. In addition, the data changes in those feeds can take an hour or longer to update in various booking systems.
How do you know that a low fare to a city you need to visit has been published? You certainly don’t have to wait for the airlines to announce a sale — in fact, as I’ve written before, “sale” prices are often far from a bargain. Thanks to the transparency provided by the Internet, you can actually keep an eye on fares, through websites like FareCompare.com and AirfareWatchdog.com. You can also subscribe to their e-mail alerts for fares between any two cities.
Reacting to a good fare — meaning booking it — quickly cannot be overestimated. In my book, I give an example of a missed opportunity from January 2008, when I was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Just before she began her speech, I received an e-mail alert from FareCompare about a $99 one-way base fare between Washington and San Francisco. As it happened, I needed to book a trip to San Francisco, but I couldn’t act immediately, since I had to write and file a story for my newspaper. By the time I was free to look into booking a ticket, the fare was gone.
Not that there was anything I could have done in this case, but the experience taught me a valuable lesson: If you get word about a really good fare, book it as soon as you can. Most domestic fares usually stay on the market at least a couple of days, but there is never a guarantee, and some vanish within hours — the airlines can do whatever they want.
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