Tickets
Airlines are consistently among the most criticized companies by both the public and the media. While much of the criticism is deserved, does some of it amount to nothing more than badmouthing that helps no one? Isn’t it time for fliers to learn the air travel system’s ins and outs, and not blame the airlines for all their ills on the road?
In this column, I’ve denounced certain airline practices, such as the fictitious “direct” flights that are simply two flights with the same number but nothing else in common. There is no question the industry has made the system very complex, mostly for financial reasons, and it’s profiting from customers’ lack of knowledge.
However, the system is what it is, and there isn’t much we can do to change it to our liking. What we can do is invest some time and effort in learning its intricacies, rules and restrictions, so we don’t feel like we got screwed next time we fly and make sure we don’t miss a wedding or a funeral, or let an airline ruin our vacation.
I talked about this on Peter Greenberg’s syndicated radio show last weekend, though I probably did too much complaining before I got to the point. Greenberg used to be the travel editor for NBC’s “Today” show but moved to CBS last year.
There are certainly times when criticism — or constructive customer feedback — does make a difference. Take just one issue with United Airlines. Last year, it announced it would do away with advance domestic upgrade certificates for top elites, but after an outcry it reversed its decision. Earlier this month, the carrier said it would reduce the number of certificates elite fliers get annually — another outcry followed, and the implementation of the new policy was delayed by a year.
Contrast that to the experience of Michelle Renee, about which I wrote last year. She decided to skip a flight on her ticketed itinerary from Los Angeles to Australia on United, but she didn’t tell the airline and was shocked to find out at the Sydney airport that the change would incur a fee. She wrote a blistering blog post against United on the Huffington Post. Had she known that if you miss a ticketed flight voluntarily, the rest of your itinerary is automatically voided, she would have thanked the agent who salvaged her ticket.
Is it the airlines’ job to educate passengers about the rules they impose or are travelers responsible for learning those rules on their own? Do most of us buy plane tickets blindly, without reading and understanding the conditions and restrictions that come with them?
In a more recent Huffington Post blog, another United critic, Tamar Abrams, wrote about being mistreated by an employee after her flight from Singapore to Tokyo was canceled. The agent’s behavior aside, I suggested to Abrams that she didn’t have to put herself in that agent’s hands. In fact, she could have known about the cancellation about 12 hours earlier, before she had gone to bed, because her plane didn’t make it to Singapore from Tokyo the previous night. She could have called United then and got rebooked, even before getting to the airport.
Was it Abrams’ responsibility to track her plane and predict the cancellation? No, but it would have helped her a lot and saved her hassle and an unpleasant experience. United usually contacts passengers regarding flight disruptions, though Abrams said she didn’t get notified in advance.
The ease with which anyone can book a plane ticket online gives the wrong impression that modern air travel is a piece of cake. Yet, most fliers don’t know the meaning of a code-share flight or the difference between a nonstop and a direct flight.
Next time, before you spend $1,000 on a ticket, it might be a good idea to learn exactly what you are buying and what it entitles you to. After all, travel should be an exciting experience, not a nuisance we dread.
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A new survey by the Consumer Travel Alliance released this week found that luggage and other additional airline fees increase the average ticket price by up to 50 percent. The truth is, there is a relatively easy way to have most of those fees waived — if only travelers were better educated and more open-minded.
My impression during almost constant global travel for most of the last decade is that people think they know how to travel — but then they complain about being “scammed” by the airlines. My approach has been to learn as much as possible about rules, restrictions and fees, and then to look for ways to waive them and generally make the system work for me.
One of the reasons I started the “On the Fly” Seminars was to educate people how to be better travelers — and to change negative attitudes toward travel. In fact, my FLY 201 class covers exactly how to get those extra fees waived: by achieving elite airline status.
Many people think they don’t travel enough to get elite status or it’s cheaper to fly a different airline every time. I find both of these arguments valid in very few cases.
First, you don’t need to fly 100,000 miles a year. The first elite level in most frequent-flier programs will get your baggage fees waived. Moreover, because of elite benefits offered and recognized across global airline alliances, a silver membership with one carrier will secure those waivers on every member-airline. You can fly on any Star member and credit your miles to any of the Star loyalty programs.
However, mileage requirements to achieve status vary greatly. For example, you need 25,000 miles for Premier on United Airlines, which will give you Star Alliance silver status — but you only need 4,000 miles on the alliance’s newest member, Greece’s Aegean Airlines. Not all fares on United earn 100 percent mileage in Aegean’s program, but right now it gives you 1,000 miles just for signing up. I’m sure if most of you looked at your flight history in the past year, you’d see that you could have qualified had you kept your miles in the same place.
Second, relying on Travelocity or Priceline to tell you which airline has the cheapest ticket and go to a different carrier every time is not the best way to fly in the current environment. Even if you had to pay a bit extra to stay within the same alliance — but if you managed to secure elite status — at the end of the year you most likely spent less money because you didn’t pay luggage fees.
There is no question that airlines should make all those extra fees more transparent earlier in the booking process. There is also little doubt that their frequent-flier programs were created to make money. But they do reward their loyal customers, so if you are going to give them your money, why not learn how to benefit from your loyalty as much as you can?
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Have you been accused by airline agents of trying to “game the system” by asking if they could open up for mileage redemption seats they obviously won’t sell for cash? Now a top airline executive is encouraging fliers to alert agents when the system fails in its predictability, so it can be “tweaked.”
Before you do that, however, make sure you know what you are talking about — learn all booking codes used by the respective carrier, if you haven’t already, and be able to access and understand its inventory data. Just because there are dozens of open business-class seats months before a flight doesn’t mean you are entitled to an upgrade or an “award” ticket.
Still, many frequent fliers have enough knowledge and experience to sense when the yield-management system — the computer software airlines use to predict how a flight will sell — is not working properly. The problem is that most agents are unreceptive when a customer points that out, saying they don’t tell inventory management what to do, because it knows best.
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How many times have you been jerked around at an airport and made to wait in several long lines after a flight delay or cancellation forced a change to the rest of your itinerary? Chances are, that happened abroad. For all their faults, U.S. airlines handle irregular operations better than their foreign peers.
I’ve always wondered why airport agents in the United States — whether at check-in counters, gates or even business lounges — can do almost anything a passenger needs, including rebooking, rerouting and reissuing tickets, while agents in other countries are much more specialized, and thus less helpful.
Rather than make sense of that reality, I’ve found a way to work around it: Whenever possible, I make sure that my tickets are issued by a U.S. carrier. That doesn’t mean that I don’t fly on foreign airlines — in the era of code-sharing, global alliances and other partnerships, that limitation is no longer an issue…
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If you ever wanted to sit in first or business class but couldn’t afford it — and upgrading wasn’t an option — your time may have arrived. While airlines await the return of paying “premium” passengers, some of them are letting lower-class fliers occupy plush lie-flat seats.
On Australia’s Qantas Airways and Germany’s Lufthansa, you can now sit in first class even if you hold a ticket for business — no miles or other upgrade instruments are necessary. Qantas also allows coach customers in the business cabin.
The two carriers still offer standard three-cabin service on most of their international networks. However, earlier this year, Qantas decided to stop selling first-class tickets on some routes where demand had slumped. While it pondered the wisdom of removing those seats, it made them part of business class…
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