I’ve always brushed off suggestions that airline websites are deliberately programmed to increase the fare if you don’t take their initial offer immediately. But I’ve become suspicious since Air Canada’s site recently jacked up a ticket price on me by hundreds of dollars in seconds, even as its lowest published fare and the flight inventory remained unchanged.
Airlines have gone to great lengths in recent years to encourage customers to book tickets on their websites, and that can certainly save travelers time and hassle in the event of any changes to a ticketed reservation. However, to their utter shame, many carriers haven’t built reliable and user-friendly sites.
In fact, some airlines, such as South Korea’s Asiana, have outsourced their entire online booking process — at least in the U.S. market — to a third-party travel agency, which charges its own booking fees. And some of us thought a carrier’s own website was the one place we could go to avoid fees.
Other airlines have made their sites so difficult to navigate that one needs a day off to figure out basic booking features and frequent-flier program rules. Not to mention that many, such as Qatar Airways, never display the most important element of a reservation: ticket numbers.
And then there are those carriers whose sites look all modern and dandy, only to go nuts on you once you begin using them. A case in point is Air Canada’s site, which went out of control last month when I tried to price out a trip from Washington to Tokyo via Toronto, as part of the research for my forthcoming book.
At first, I got a total of $1,014.82, booked in L class on all four segments. The site cancels the pricing page automatically after 10 minutes if you don’t make a purchase — I didn’t — and sends you back to the home page. I thought I’d simply rebuild the same itinerary.
To my astonishment, this time the site broke the fare into W and S classes, producing a total of $1,611.82. I checked the tariff and the inventory on ExpertFlyer.com, which I use to access raw real-time airline data, to make sure nothing had changed in the past 15 minutes, and it hadn’t. I also called Air Canada to verify that. There was no reason for the site’s odd behavior.
I started a new search with the same elements, and a new surprise followed just seconds later. Now the booking classes were M on the outbound and L on the return, for a total of $3,794.82. I tried again, and this time I got a through M fare on the outbound and broken S/W on the way back, for a total of $4,088.82.
I’ve been skeptical about suggestions that airline deliberately increase prices on unsuspecting customers because I know how airfares work. For a particular fare to change, one of two things has to happen: a change in the tariff or the inventory. If they both stay the same, there is no reason for the price to jump by hundreds or thousands of dollars within seconds. That was the case here.
So what was the Air Canada website doing? Did it remember my data and play tricks on me? I tried closing my browser and reopening it, but that didn’t help. I checked back a couple of days later, and the same shenanigans repeated. In another couple of days, I rebooted my computer, and I finally got the initial and proper fare — at $1,015.29, it was 47 cents higher because of currency fluctuations.
I decided to do the same experiment again and performed three additional searches, just a couple of minutes apart. Sure enough, the fare came back higher every time: $1,612.29, $3,795.29 and $4,089.29.
I called Air Canada and spoke with a very polite reservations supervisor named Monalisa. At first, she thought I was doing something wrong and confirmed the $1,015.29 fare on her system, and also verified the tariff and the inventory, which still showed nine seats in L class. Then she went to the website and did exactly what I’d done — she was as surprised as I was to see those outlandish prices. She promised to report the problem to the appropriate department.
It could be just a software glitch — after all, the fare difference should be more subtle than $600 if deliberate — but it certainly looks suspicious. If Air Canada doesn’t want to drive customers away and into the arms of third-party sites, such as Expedia and Travelocity — or worse, other airlines — it should offer a much stellar booking experience on its own site.
But that wasn’t Air Canada’s only problem. I noticed that the penalties for changes and cancellations displayed under the priced itineraries were unusual for heavily discounted international tickets. Moreover, they never changed even as the fare kept going up.
They said the tickets were refundable for C$200 — there is currently near-parity between the U.S. and Canadian dollars — and “cancellations can be made up to 45 minutes prior to departure.” Changes could be made “prior to day of departure” for $100 each way, “plus applicable taxes and any additional fare difference.” On the departure day, changes were permitted at the airport for C$100 “plus applicable taxes (no charge for fare difference) for same-day flights only.”
I didn’t trust what I saw, so I checked the actual fare rules on ExpertFlyer, which are published by none other than Air Canda. As I suspected, the L fare was nonrefundable, and the change fee was $250. I went back to the carrier’s website and discovered a hardly noticeable link at the bottom of the page to the proper fare rules, which matched the information on ExpertFlyer.
These were big discrepancies, and I suspected they were causing serious problems, so I mentioned them to Monalisa. Unlike the fare-rising problem, she was aware of this one. “I’ve made several complaints in the last several months [to the website people], but they apparently this isn’t a priority for them,” she told me.
She also explained that the rules shown on the Air Canada site are typical for domestic Canadian tickets, and they use the same template for the much more diverse international rules, instead of creating new content. If a customer who has booked a nonrefundable ticket on the website wants to cancel it, Monalisa said they will honor the incorrect rules displayed on the site.
So until they bother to fix the problem — perhaps that would be more expensive than refunding tickets — travelers will keep taking advantage of the mistake. If you are one of them, make sure to print out those made-up rules.
Similar examples can be found on many other websites. Delta Airlines, for instance, has put the following text on a page titled “Ticket Changes”: “For travel outside the United States, the change fee is typically $250, but can vary based on location and type of fare. Changes are usually permitted only to the return portion of an international itinerary.”
No issue with the first sentence, assuming travel originates in the United States. As for the second, I can’t even imagine who and why came up with such a misguided blanket statement. All you need to do is read the actual rules of any international Delta fare to realize that, if any changes can be made, they are in fact allowed on both the outbound and return portions.
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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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As if the existing methods to overcharge travelers weren’t enough, some airlines have just found a new way deeper into your pockets. It comes in the form of sophisticated software designed to increase prices based on your desperation and lack of choice. Will you fall for the latest gimmick?
The new application is courtesy of Amadeus, one of the major distributors of airline and other travel-related data worldwide. This week, it announced the launch of “Active Valuation,” an “IT solution that enables airlines to maximize revenues across multiple channels,” or to charge you more for something you can otherwise get at a lower price.
Amadeus was surprisingly open about how it will help carriers to take more of your money, although it makes marketing sense to point that out in order to attract airlines to sign up. Amadeus already has contracts with several major airlines, including Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines, Brazil’s TAM, the United Arab Emirates’ Etihad and Air Baltic. The first three carriers are members of the global Star Alliance.
“‘Active Valuation’ works by enabling the application of sophisticated business logic to dynamically adjust the yield (revenue expected) of an airline product, according to the context in which a booking is made,” Amadeus said in a statement posted on several travel news sites.
“These yield modifiers are used in a seamless manner in order to perform an origin and destination calculation,” it added. “This allows a dynamic segmentation of customers, taking into consideration their characteristics, the point of sale used and any connecting flight data, in order to better capture their willingness to pay.”
My feelings about this statement are strong and mixed at the same time. On one hand, Amadeus obviously deserves credit for developing a new product that will no doubt boost its business. On the other hand, “Active Valuation” sounds like a recipe for screwing consumers over big time.
How does this work? If you live in the United States and want to buy a plane ticket between two European cities, you may be paying more than someone who makes the purchase in Europe. The airlines are banking on your lack of knowledge about European fares and betting on your willingness to spend more money than a European traveler, who can distinguish a good fare from a bad one.
As Amadeus pointed out this week, airlines have been doing similar tricks for years through their inventory management and are now simply expanding them. “For example, when a customer requests availability information for a multi-leg journey, the solution automatically considers the complete value of the trip and delivers appropriate availability information to the customer,” it said.
What does that mean? Let’s say you need to go from Washington to Hong Kong — there are no nonstop flights on that route, so you’ll connect in Chicago. Let’s assume that the Washington-Chicago flight has availability in the lowest booking class, as does Chicago-Hong Kong. However, when those two segments are “married up” to produce your connection, the lowest-priced seats would often disappear, and you’d have to pay for a higher booking class, which could mean hundreds of dollars more.
None of the major U.S. carriers uses Amadeus, but American Express and Carlson Wagonlit, two of the country’s largest travel agencies, do. It also powers online booking engines, such as Expedia and CheapTickets. Plus, if Amadeus figured out how to do those new gimmicks, its competitors won’t be far behind.
So how would you fight against all those airline attempts to “maximize revenue”? Demand an addition to the Passengers Bill of Rights? Complain to your congressman? Good luck. We live in a capitalist society, and every company has the right to maximize revenue in any legal way it can find — although some have found questionable methods, such as the fake “direct” flights I wrote about last month.
As you might have guessed, my approach is education — learn as much as possible about what the airlines do, and about the entire air travel system, and beat them at their own game. If you don’t know that something is happening, how would you know how to avoid it?
In my last column, I explained why corporate travel lacks innovation. One of the reasons is companies’ heavy reliance on old-style travel agencies, which in turn rely on computers to tell them what to do. The result is millions of dollars in unnecessary spending.
The Amadeus announcement is another reminder that if you keep using the old approach, you will continue to waste money. My method is simple: having mastered the system and its intricacies, I rely on my knowledge and experience buying tickets and flying around the world — that’s how I beat the computer.
Is that good enough advertising for my “On the Fly” Seminars and the Kralev International advisory services?
In all seriousness, this summer I decided to dedicate myself to travel education, even though such a concept doesn’t even exist, and I’m probably the only person who uses the words “travel” and “education” together. I’ll continue to preach it until people start listening.
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Why have corporate travel managers become so prone to inertia and averse to innovation in recent years? Why are numerous companies spending millions of dollars more on travel than necessary? Is it time for the travel manager’s job description to change?
I’ve been trying to find answers to these questions since I dedicated myself to travel education and training this summer, through my “On the Fly” Seminars and the Kralev International advisory services.
But it was a post by Scott Gillespie, who writes a blog on procurement and corporate travel management, that prompted me to air my thoughts in public. Although my arguments aren’t quite what he had in mind, I was happy to see that others share my concerns about corporate complacency.
Why do I feel qualified to pass judgment? Because I almost always pay the lowest coach fares, but I haven’t sat in coach since 2002 — and I’ve flown nearly 2 million miles and visited 38 states and 82 countries. And because this year, I’ve flown 100,000 revenue miles, for which I paid a grand total of $747. I’ve never admitted this publicly before, although friends have repeatedly urged me to use it as a selling point — I just didn’t think anyone would believe it. That’s why I’m writing a book, so I can explain it.
I’ve been shocked by how many companies still rely on large travel agencies without almost any meaningful supervision. I’m not suggesting that they stop using travel agents, because this may be the only way to handle high volume. The problem is that, in many cases, they are not getting the cheapest available tickets — but they don’t know it.
Why does that happen? One reason is that many travel agencies have lucrative contracts with certain airlines that encourage them to send more business their way. If your agency receives its biggest commission from American Airlines, it will likely book you on American even if United Airlines has a lower fare. Did the agency disclose any of this before you signed a contract?
The other reason is much less obvious, but hopefully this column will change that. While technology and automation are enormously useful and efficient, they discourage us from using our brains. Automation is no doubt vital for the travel-booking process, but the extent to which travel agents rely on computers to tell them what to do is stunning — and it costs your company a lot of money.
Let me give you an example. Last year, my former managing editor at the Washington Times had to go to Mongolia at a week’s notice and asked if I could find an affordable business-class fare. The cheapest ticket from Washington to Ulan Bator we could find — both from a travel agent and online booking engines — was about $8,700, which was out of the question.
So I started thinking outside the box and decided to try splitting the fare — if I could get a much lower business-class fare to a northeastern Asian city where one would connect on the way to Ulan Bator, I’d book the short haul in coach. Sure enough, I found a $3,250 business-class ticket to Beijing on Air Canada, and coach on to Ulan Bator on Air China for about $550. Both carriers are members of the global Star Alliance.
While any company most likely would have paid $8,700, I saved almost $5,000 — and it took me 15 minutes to do it. When was the last time your travel agent did that? I’m not suggesting that splitting the fare makes sense every time, but there are other creative — and legitimate — ways to save money that computers are not yet fully capable of mastering.
There are also things you can do to help your travel agency save you money. One of the services I offer is strategic travel planning. What does that mean? If you have more than one trip coming up, why not plan them at the same time? You don’t have to take them together — in fact, they can be months apart.
Several months ago, I had a client in Washington who wanted to go to Paris in the spring and to Buenos Aires in the fall. I knew that coach fares from Europe to South America are generally lower than fares from North America, so I suggested an unconventional way of booking two tickets simultaneously — one originating in Washington and the other one in Paris — and the savings exceeded $800. I won’t bore you with further details here, but send me a message if you’d like to know more.
How do you think most travel managers respond when I offer to train them and anyone in their company who might book travel directly? Some say their travel agency already takes care of all their needs and there is no reason to rock the boat. Others are unhappy with the travel agency, but they don’t have money to invest in learning how to save much more money. Yet others don’t seem to understand what exactly I can do for them.
Last week, a friend in Phoenix recommended my services to his company’s travel manager. The response was that, “due to budget cuts to travel budgets and their departmental budget, they felt that they could not justify the expenditure right now.” No comment.
In June, a business-development specialist from a Washington law firm took one of my seminars and saved $500 on her first ticket, so she recommended to the firm that I train their executive assistants who book travel for the attorneys. Management, however, saw things differently. “We have an agreement with American Express, so bringing you in would conflict,” they said.
I asked how exactly that would represent a conflict, since I wasn’t offering to book tickets for them, but I never received a response.
Nor did I hear back from the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, having contacted Megan Costello, then-acting executive director, Kate Farrell, senior director for global education, and Amber Kelleher, director for global education, three months ago. I suppose they have better things to do than listen to new ideas that can actually benefit their members.
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Are you one of those travelers who wait until they get to the airport to find out that their flight has been delayed or canceled? It’s time to become a proactive flier and learn how to predict disruptions, so you can get rebooked before anyone else on your flight, with a minimum impact on your travel plans.
Although there is no guarantee that your prediction success rate will be 100 percent, because airlines often swap aircraft, the method I’ve adopted works most of the time. It’s actually rather simple: I track the planes assigned to my flights by matching arrival and departure gates. Continental Airlines makes it even easier by providing the most advanced data in the industry, but more on that later.
The aircraft for a United Airlines flight I recently took from Washington to San Francisco came from Sao Paulo. Had the flight from Brazil been late, I would have known hours in advance, which would have allowed me to get rebooked on the phone before even leaving home.
You might ask why you need to waste time tracking planes and matching gates, when airlines usually send e-mail and phone alerts in case of delays and cancellations. I find that I’m usually ahead of them, because for some reason their systems often take hours to update.
If I see that United 952 from Washington to Frankfurt is four hours late, I know immediately that the return flight 953 will be delayed, too. But I’ve seen United take hours to reflect that in its system, perhaps hoping that the plane will make time in the air. That can be a valid reason to wait for a final determination, as can be the possibility that another aircraft may be found to replace the delayed one.
So why am I so sure Flight 953 won’t depart on time if Flight 952 is four hours late? There is only one Boeing 767 flying to Frankfurt daily, and it operates both 952 and 953, which leaves no room for aircraft substitution. In addition, the turnaround time for that plane on the ground in Frankfurt is less than two hours, so there is no way the plane will leave Frankfurt on time after arriving from Washington four hours late.
Knowing the type of aircraft assigned to your flight would make the gate-matching exercise much faster, especially at a hub like Washington Dulles or Chicago. To make it even easier, you can use your departing airport’s website, which will display all arriving flights in a certain time frame with their gates on the same page. If you know your flight leaves from Gate 72 in Los Angeles, save yourself time by going to the LAX website, rather than the United site.
Most planes, of course, operate several flights a day, so if I have time, I track my planes since their first voyage in the morning. Yesterday, for example, the Boeing 767 I flew on from LA to Chicago had started the day in LA, flown to Denver and Chicago before returning to LA to pick me up. By the way, the tail number of that plane was N666UA.
What about aircraft replacement? That’s another reason to do your homework. That flight from Washington to San Francisco I mentioned earlier was scheduled to be operated on a Boeing 767 — with a domestic seat configuration, which means two cabins and those utterly unimpressive domestic first-class seats. As soon as I learned my plane was coming from Sao Paulo, I knew there had been a swap to an internationally configured, three-cabin Boeing 777, so I’d sit in a much more comfortable business-class seat. Since the substitution changed seat assignments, I quickly logged in and grabbed my favorite seat in the business cabin.
All major U.S. carriers’ websites show gate information, but Continental beats them all to the punch by displaying much more valuable data — it actually shows the tail number of the specific aircraft assigned to your flight and tells you where it’s coming from, including the inbound flight’s number. For instance, you are flying from Newark to Berlin on Flight 96 today, your Boeing 767′s tail number is N158CO, and it’s coming from Zurich as Flight 79. Right next to that information on the Continental site is a link to the real-time status of that flight.
Continental goes even further, offering descriptions of beverage and meal services for that particular flight, as well as data on in-seat power, entertainment, aircraft features and seat configuration.
This is a great example of a customer-friendly policy, which the merged United should adopt on its website. In fact, all airlines should provide that information — it would certainly make our lives much easier.
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