Denver
United Airlines, already one of the biggest abusers of fake “direct” flights before its merger with Continental, has increased further the number of those flights in its schedule. Its oddest decision was to introduce fictitious “direct” flights, which consist of two or more segments with nothing in common but their number, between its hubs.
If you are shopping for a ticket from Chicago (ORD) to Denver (DEN), be very careful which flight you book. In addition to 10 daily nonstops with flying time of about 2 hours, United currently has three “direct” flights on that route, but they make a “stop” in Minneapolis (MSP), Des Moines, Iowa, (DSM) and Kansas City, Mo., (MCI), respectively.
Watch out for any indication of that, as obscure as it may be. In most cases, those are not just “stops” — the two “legs” are operated by different aircraft, so they are simply connecting flights. For example, the first “leg” of flight 817 yesterday arrived in Minneapolis at gate E6, but the “continuation” departed from gate E10.
As I’ve written before, most flights labelled “direct” by U.S. carriers are fictitious — they don’t exist in real life. They are meant to make more money for the airlines by tricking customers and perverting a practice that was actually started to help travelers. In fact, they spell nothing but trouble for passengers.
Historically, United and Delta have had more fake “direct” flights in their schedules than any other U.S. carriers, though all airlines engage in that practice.
For years, United has focused on adding at least one domestic tag to most of its international flights. For instance, flight 917 from Frankfurt (FRA) to Washington (IAD) “continues” on to Seattle (SEA), though the second flight has nothing in common with the fist. Yesterday, the flight from FRA was operated by a three-cabin Boeing 777, as usual, and arrived at IAD at gate C1. The flight to SEA was operated by a two-cabin Boeing 757 and departed from gate D4.
In the last several months, United has significantly stepped up the questionable practice on purely domestic flights. Currently, there are very few flights with only one segment. Most flights between Washington National (DCA) and Chicago (ORD) used to be one-leg flights. Now, most are part of fake “direct” flights with two or three segments.
It’s clear why the airline is selling “direct” flights from DCA to San Francisco (SFO) — it wants you to think that you can go all the way to the West coast from DCA with no hassle.
But why on earth is it selling fake “direct” flights from IAD to SFO, given that there are nine nonstops on that hub-to-hub route on most days? In its upcoming winter schedule, it has four “direct” flights between those cities. Two of them have two segments — one “stopping” in Dallas (DFW) and one in SEA. The other two have three segments each — one “stopping” in DEN and Las Vegas (LAS), and the other one in ORD and San Diego (SAN).
Is it possible that United has run out of flight numbers because of the merger? That may be the case with three-digit numbers, but what’s wrong with four-digit ones?
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Do you sometimes prefer making a connection or two instead of taking a nonstop flight, either to save money or rack up more frequent-flier miles? You might have to change your ways. Domestic U.S. transfers are now allowed much less frequently than before, and making connections on flights between an airline’s hubs is almost impossible.
No big deal, you might say. Wouldn’t any reasonable person choose a nonstop any time? Not necessarily. Different travelers have different priorities — some would rather save time, others money. But the best thing about the previous practice was that passengers had options. Now, that’s no longer the case.
Until June, you could make four transfers each way between Washington and Los Angeles on United Airlines — both cities are United hubs. Since then, the lowest fares have said this in the legal routing rules:
TRAVEL MUST BE NONSTOP
It’s not until fares of just under $700 round trip that the routing gets a bit more liberal — but it allows only one connection and only at a hub airport. Here is how this looks in the United tariff:
WAS-CHI/DEN/LAX/SFO-LAX
The slash indicates that you must choose among Chicago, Denver and San Francisco, but you can’t go through two of them — you would have been able to do so had there been a hyphen between them.
How does this affect you? As of this morning, the lowest published United fare between Washington and Los Angeles is $119 each way and books in L class — but it’s only valid on nonstop flights. What if none of the nonstops on the day you need to fly has available L seats? Then you will have to buy up to S booking class — the next lowest currently published — or whatever seat is available. There may be L availability on a connection through Denver, but it wouldn’t qualify for the L fare because it’s not nonstop. The bottom line is, the routing restriction will cost you at least $100 more.
United was actually the last of the major carriers to clamp down on routing rules, and many mileage runners — people who fly just to accumulate miles — had lots of fun for a long time. It still has one of the more liberal rules — except between hubs. American Airlines and US Airways follow the same policy. American requires a nonstop between Dallas and Miami, and US Airways between Philadelphia and Phoenix.
Delta Airlines is one of the strictest. For example, discounted fares between Atlanta, its main hub, and most major cities require a nonstop, even if that city is not a hub, such as San Diego and Las Vegas. A fair comparison would be the United routing between Washington and Las Vegas, which is much more generous:
WAS-SFO/LAX/DEN/CHI/WAS/EWR/HOU/CLE/PHL/CLT/PHX-LAS
This is actually a typical United routing. You can transfer only once at a hub, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be a United hub — Continental and US Airways hubs are also allowed, because United code-shares a huge number of their flights. Of course, current Continental hubs will become United hubs once their merger is complete.
Delta is so strict, in fact, that sometimes it requires a nonstop when neither of the two cities is a hub — for example, between Washington and Los Angeles. The curious part is that Delta doesn’t fly nonstop between those cities, but it code-shares the only daily Alaska Airlines flight from Washington National. So the only way to get a decent fare is to book that one flight at 9:15 a.m. If you can’t, you have to pony up.
To be fair, Delta allows both nonstops and “direct” flights, and when the other carriers say nonstop, they do mean nonstop. “Direct” flights are those fictitious flights I wrote about last month, which have nothing in common except for their number — most of them are operated on different planes and require changing gates and sometimes even terminals.
In addition, Delta is not always as draconian as in the Washington-Los Angeles case. Here is the routing between non-hubs Chicago and Los Angeles:
CHI-SLC/MSP/DTT/CVG/MEM/ATL/LAX/IND/DEN/SFO/LAS/PHX-LAX
The smaller the city, the more liberal the routing — although some bigger places seem to fall through the cracks, probably not for too long. Here is the United routing from Washington to Houston.
WAS-ATL/CLE/DTT/DAY/CMH/IND/RDU-CHI-HOU
WAS-ROC-BUF-CHI-HOU
WAS-ABE/HAR/ROA/SDF/RIC/CAK/CRW/ORF-CHI-HOU
WAS-NYC/EWR-ATL/CLE/DTT/DAY/CMH/IND/RDU-CHI-HOU
WAS-NYC/EWR-ROC-BUF-CHI-HOU
WAS-NYC/EWR-ABE/HAR/ROA/SDF/RIC/CAK/CRW/ORF-CHI-HOU
If you look closely, you will see that up to four transfers are permitted here — this many hyphens are very rare these days. I have the feeling this generosity will disappear once United and Continental start flying as one airline, for which both Washington and Houston will be hubs.
International routings are much more liberal and sometime can fill a page, but that’s a topic for another column.
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Did you know that hundreds of fictitious flights inhabit airline schedules every day? They don’t exist in real life — just on paper. They are meant to make more money for the airlines by tricking customers and perverting a practice that was actually started to help travelers. In fact, they spell nothing but trouble for passengers.
Those fictitious flights are labeled “direct” by the airlines, which years ago decided to rewrite the dictionary and use that term for flights that weren’t nonstop but made at least one stop on the way to their destination. First, those flights were operated by the same aircraft, but later a “plane change” was introduced. The Department of Transportation has allowed the airlines to abuse the practice any way they like.
On my way back home from Boston last weekend, I was on United Airlines Flight 897, which the purser announced repeatedly was “a nonstop service to Washington Dulles, with continuing service to Beijing.”
I immediately cringed, because there is nothing “continuing” about the two flights, except for their number. The plane I was on was a two-cabin Boeing 757 and arrived at gate C19 at Dulles. The plane destined for Beijing was a three-cabin Boeing 777 and departed from gate C3. So the passengers connecting to Beijing did exactly what others did connecting to Flight 803 to Tokyo at gate C1 — or any other flight for that matter. They left the first plane and walked to their new gate.
Did the Beijing-bound travelers benefit in any way from the fact that their tickets had one flight from Boston to Beijing? Absolutely not. In fact, many of them were probably surprised to discover they were on two separate flights.
Then why does United even have that fictitious “direct” flight? Because it wants customers to think that they can fly from Boston to Beijing without the hassle of a connection — a competitive advantage no other carrier offers.
Have you tried to upgrade a “direct” flight? That can be a nightmare — not just for passengers but also for those who work in inventory management. They have to create inventory for a flight that doesn’t exist and to balance the load of two separate flights on different aircraft types with a different number of cabins and hugely different number of seats. As a result, the lowest booking classes and upgrades are often unavailable on “direct” flights. Some travelers are willing to pay more to avoid the hassle of transfers, not realizing there is a hidden connection.
Almost every international United flight has a domestic tag attached to it, but United is by no means the only U.S. airline abusing the system. All major carriers do it. Delta pretends to fly “directly” from Minneapolis to Moscow, Continental from Amsterdam to Denver, US Airways from Los Angeles to Zurich and American from Tokyo to Boston.
As I wrote two years ago, United and Delta are the biggest abusers, while American seems to be the most prudent in that most of its “direct” flights are operated by the same aircraft. American is also the only one whose website displays a “direct” flight as two separate segments at the very beginning of the booking process.
In the rare cases when foreign carriers, such as Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines, operate “direct” flights, they are flown on the same plane, so there is no danger you will miss your “continuation,” which happens regularly on U.S. airlines. If my flight from Boston to Washington had been late, United wouldn’t have held the plane for Beijing just because the two flights share the same number.
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Captain Dennis Flanagan, the United Airlines pilot I profiled last year, just reminded me about the upcoming anniversary of the September 11 attacks and the scholarship fund in the name of his former colleague, Captain Jason Dahl, who was at the controls of United Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania.
The charity, whose official name is the Captain Jason Dahl Scholarship Fund, was established soon after the pilot’s death by his wife Sandy. Each year, two aviation students — one at Dahl’s Alma Mater, San Jose State University, and one at Metro State University in Denver, where Dahl lived — are awarded $5,000 grants. There have been 16 recipients so far.
The fund’s ambition is to expand and offer scholarships nationally, and it uses this time of year to do fund-raising, said Flanagan, who is better known as Captain Denny. “It seems the farther we get away from that tragic day, the less people remember. Our goal is to keep Jason’s memory alive and not let anyone forget,” Flanagan said.
You can learn more about the fund, its board of directors and past scholarship winners on its website, where you can also make a contribution.
“Jason Dahl represented the best in the American aviation community, always providing assistance to others in both his chosen vocation and his community,” the site says. “The family and friends of Captain Jason Dahl strive to be more like him.”
As has been well documented in press reports, Dahl, who was 43, wasn’t originally scheduled to work that fatal flight on Sept. 11, 2001. He traded trips with a colleague so he can take time off for his wedding anniversary on Sept. 14. Still, he seems to have had second thoughts, as he later sent out an e-mail message looking for another pilot to replace him on Flight 93.
The hijacked flight, a scheduled service from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco and the subject of the film “United 93,” is believed to have been headed to Washington. The Boeing 757 aircraft was ultimately brought down by passengers who apparently stormed the cockpit and attacked the hijackers. The plane crashed in a field in Stonycreek Township, near Shanksville, Pa.
Most of us remember where we were and what we were doing when we first heard of or saw those planes smashing into the World Trade Center. Each year on Sept. 11, commemorative ceremonies take place in New York, Washington and in that Pennsylvania field.
As it happens, this year I’ll be teaching an “On the Fly” Seminar in New York on that day, and two weeks later in Boston, from where the two planes that hit the Twin Towers departed. We have our own ways of remembering and paying respects, and mine is helping travelers make their journey less stressful and more enjoyable.
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How do airlines decide what fares qualify as “sales,” and why do they advertise certain fares, but not other, much lower ones? Why is United Airlines promoting a “sale” between Washington and Boston for $109 each way, when there are currently six published lower fares in that market, beginning with $49 each way?
For the most part, I don’t bother to figure out why airlines do certain things anymore. I just gather all the information I need about what they do and try to work with it — or around it. Years of watching fares have taught me not to fall for those “sales,” because in many cases, I can find a much lower price to the same destination, on the same dates and on the same carrier.
Both United and American Airlines are currently advertising two fall sales on their websites. My review of the American fares showed that most of them are indeed the lowest available prices at this time. There are a few small exceptions — for example, I found a fare from New York to San Diego that is $5 lower than the advertised $164.
There are many more and much bigger differences on United. The unadvertised — but published — fares between Washington and Boston, in addition to $49 each way, are $54, $64, $74, $84 and $99. They all have fewer restrictions than the $109 “sale” price.
I say between Washington and Boston — not from Washington to Boston — because domestic fares are the same in either direction, unlike international fares, which are usually very different.
Let’s take another example. The advertised fares between Denver and Los Angeles in two separate United “sales” are $99 and $89 each way. However, I found $68 each way. In addition, Denver-New Orleans is on “sale” for $123 each way, but there is also $109, and even $89.
Some of the advertised United fares are truly the lowest published at this time. For example, $88 each way for Washington-Chicago, $108 for Chicago-Denver, and $157 for Chicago-Los Angeles.
There is another catch that could increase the benefit of the unadvertised fares to you. Typically, “sale” prices require a round-trip purchase. In contrast, most of the lower fares I found have no such condition. In fact, the major U.S. carriers have been publishing more and more truly one-way fares in recent months, which has always been the case with Southwest Airlines and other low-cost carriers.
To United’s credit, some of its current sales don’t require a round-trip purchase. That is, indeed, the prudent thing to do. If a round trip is mandatory, why advertise one-way fares? Of course, for marketing purposes, but I’ve always found that a bit dishonest and deliberately misleading.
I mean no criticism of United for promoting as “sales” fares that are higher than other published fares. I wrote this to warn travelers that they should check all existing fares between two cities before settling for what they think is a “sale” or the best deal.
Those of you who have attended my “On the Fly” Seminars know how easy it is to bring up on your computer screen all fares published by every airline on a certain route in just seconds.
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