Department Of Transportation
The Indian government has done what authorities in most market economies would rarely dare to try — it has forced Indian carriers to slash domestic airfares by as much as a quarter, and to publish fare ranges on every route on their websites regardless of travel dates. While helping consumers is admirable, is New Delhi crossing a line?
Angered by the pricing policies of India’s airlines, including low-cost carriers IndiGo, SpiceJet and GoAir, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) gave them an ultimatum last weekend to lower fares or face severe consequences, the Indian press reported. Within hours, fares dropped between 20 and 25 percent.
On Monday, the DGCA ordered airline chiefs to start posting on their websites at the beginning of every month fares on specific routes with advance-purchase requirements of 21, 14 and seven days before departure, as well as last-minute prices.
“We just want everything to be made public, including giving DGCA the parameters of number of seats getting sold and fare moving to next higher level. In case of any sudden jump, we will be able to check if lower bucket fare seats have been sold, and then spot fares are at the highs or is it something else,” DGCA chief E. K. Bharat Bhushan was quoted as saying by the Times of India.
This column has been critical of several dishonest and manipulative practices in the airline industry, including misleading fare advertising. Transparency is essential in an era of ever-growing airline fees and heavy fuel surcharges. In October, I wrote about new ways some carriers have found to overcharge unsuspecting customers.
It’s well-known that Indian domestic fares had become ridiculously high, but was such a drastic government intervention necessary? The DGCA plans to micromanage airline fare-setting and inventory, which will effectively end dynamic pricing, the very essence of today’s industry model.
“In case of any sudden jump to the highest fare level, the DGCA will be able to check if the spurt is due to seats at lower price levels having been sold out or whether it is manipulation by the travel industry,” the Times of India wrote on Tuesday.
The U.S. Department of Transportation will be happy if American carriers advertise actual fares on their websites — not $200 to Europe each way, based on a required round-trip purchase, when taxes and surcharges bring the total price to $800. But an attempt by DOT to follow India’s examples would probably lead to a revolution.
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Continue reading about Is India going too far in curbing airfares?
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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Airlines abuse ‘direct’ flights
Three major travel-industry organizations begin a campaign on Tuesday to compel the airlines to disclose all fees not included in the ticket price at the same time as the actual fare — and before the ticket is issued. But will such a campaign succeed?
The groups — the Business Travel Coalition (BTC), the American Society of Travel Agents and the Consumer Travel Alliance — want consumers to sign a petition to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. The text urges him “to require airlines to fully disclose their fees, whether airfares are purchased on an airline’s website or through an online or brick-and-mortar travel agency.”
The organizations plan to deliver the petition to LaHood on Sept. 23, which they have designated as “Mad As Hell Day.” They have created a special website and a YouTube channel.
“It is imperative that we, as consumers, have the ability to comparison-shop and know the full cost of a trip before committing to a purchase,” BTC Chairman Kevin Mitchell said in an e-mail message on Monday. The “airline hidden fees can surprise us at the airport, ruining our holidays, or vanquishing our business travel budgets. For example, check baggage fees can add 30%, 40% or more to the price of a ticket.”
The campaign is in support of the Department of Transportation’s Notice of Proposed Rule Making, regarding airline-passenger protections, Mitchell said.
What’s the likelihood that this initiative will be more successful than previous attempts to extract similar disclosures from the airlines? How long has the battle over false airfare advertising been going on? To this day, you see examples like this one on most U.S. airline websites: $199 each way, based on a required round-trip purchase, plus taxes and surcharges.
If a round trip is mandatory, why on earth are they quoting half of the price? It’s actually less than half, given the extra taxes. As I’ve written before, such deception is not tolerated in Europe and most other parts of the world.
If you can’t get the airlines to be open and honest about their fares, how are you supposed to force them to disclose additional fees? While everyone has to pay for the fare, many passengers are exempt from luggage, standby and other fees — an argument the airlines will no doubt use against the new campaign.
Getting those fees waived is easier than most travelers think. As I wrote in July, all you need is the lowest level of elite status on any member of one of the three global airline alliances — Oneworld, SkyTeam or the Star Alliance — to have your bags fly for free alliance-wide. And sometimes, it takes as little as 3,000 miles to achieve that.
As often happens, my advice has to do with travel education. Air travel has become a maze of rules, fees and restrictions that’s hard to keep up with. So travelers need to invest time to learn the system and find ways to work around it. My experience so far with “On the Fly” Seminars shows that most people don’t think they need to get educated. How many more fees and other frustrations will it take to change their mind?
Related stories:
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When an airfare sale is not quite a sale
Fare sales often lost in translation
Continue reading about 9/23 is ‘mad as hell day’ over airline fees
Just as many loyal United Airlines customers hoped that its expected merger with Continental Airlines would put an end to United’s massive blocking of “award” seats made available for mileage redemption by its partners in the global Star Alliance, the carrier made a government filing that raised new questions about its filtering policy.
With all the complex issues United and Continental have to resolve before completing their merger, which would create the world’s largest airline, the “award” blocking is hardly a top agenda item. In fact, I’d be surprised if it has come up at all in their negotiations so far.
However, it’s an important matter for many elite members of United’s Mileage Plus program, as shown by the overwhelming response to my original column exposing the previously secret practice in September 2008. A thread on FlyerTalk.com, the largest online travel community, that was started at the time has had more than 100,000 views and over 2,000 responses to date…
Continue reading about United’s award blocking an issue in Continental merger
American carriers can relax — their freedom to fly anywhere in the European Union is no longer threatened by Washington’s refusal to allow foreign control of U.S. airlines. That was the biggest news from last week’s agreement to expand the 2007 U.S.-EU Open Skies accord.
When the deal was first negotiated, carriers from both sides of the Atlantic were permitted to fly between any two cities without the previous government restrictions. However, those rights could have been lost next year, unless European companies could own controlling shares in U.S. airlines. Although that hasn’t happened, the EU agreed on Thursday to extend Open Skies indefinitely.
“It’s a big win for us,” said John R. Byerly, the top U.S. negotiator and deputy assistant secretary of state for transportation affairs. “There was a cloud hanging over the stability in the trans-Atlantic market, and now it’s gone. It was not an easy agreement. It took us eight rounds, beginning in the late spring of 2008″…
Continue reading about U.S. has ‘no desire’ to ease airline ownership rules
