So I'm looking into flying home in the next few weeks so I go to aircanada.com to check prices and punch in my dates and click get flights. Looks like its $304 down and $324 back. Not bad. Not great, but not bad.
So then I start thinking, maybe the wifey would want to come along too, (I'm traveling on company business), and so just for shits and giggles I put in the same dates with 2 passengers. $446 out and $426 back!!! What the @#$! is that???
Is it normal practice to gouge people that are traveling in pairs? Why the hell wouldn't I just book two single tickets and pay the $15 for advanced seat selection?
I think this happened last time we traveled too, and we just booked two separate round trip tickets. When we checked in together we still wound up with seats together.
Sorry for the rant. This just pissed me off and I'd kinda like to know the logic behind it.
Is this normal?
Moderators: sky's the limit, sepia, Sulako, lilfssister, North Shore, I WAS Birddog
If Airlines Sold Paint:
Customer (CU): Hi, how much is your paint?
Clerk (CL). Well, sir, that all depends.
CU. Depends on what?
CL: Actually, a lot of things.
CU: How about giving me an average price?
CL: Wow, that's too hard a question. The lowest price is $9 a litre, and we have 150 different prices up to $200 a litre.
CU: What's the difference in the paint?
CL: Oh, there isn't any difference, it's all the same paint.
CU: Well, then, I'd like some of that $9 paint.
CL: Well, first I need to ask you a few questions. When do you intend to use it?
CU: I want to paint tomorrow, on my day off.
CL: Sir, the paint for tomorrow is the $200 paint.
CU: What? When would I have to paint in order to get the $9 version?
CL: That would be in three weeks, but you will also have to agree to start painting before Friday of that week and continue painting until at least Sunday.
CU: You've got to be kidding!
CL: Sir, we don't kid around here. Of course I'll have to check to see if we have any of that paint available before I can sell it to you.
CU: What do you mean, check to see if you can sell it to me? You have shelves full of the stuff, I can see it right there.
CL: Just because you can see it doesn't mean that we have it. It may be the same paint, but we sell only a certain number of litres on any given weekend. Oh, and by the way, the price just went up to $12.
CU: You mean the price went up while we were talking?
CL: Yes, sir. You see, we change prices and rules thousands of times a day, and since you haven't actually walked out of the store with your paint yet, we just decided to change. Unless you want the same thing to happen again, I would suggest that you get on with your purchase. How many litres do you want?
CU: I don't know exactly. Maybe five litres. Maybe I should buy six litres just to make sure I have enough.
CL: Oh, no, sir, you can't do that. If you buy the paint and then don't use it, you will be liable for penalties and possible confiscation of the paint you already have.
CU: What?
CL: That's right. We can sell you enough paint to do your kitchen, bathroom, hall and north bedroom, but if you stop painting before you do the bedroom, you will be in violation of our tariffs.
CU: But what does it matter to you whether I use all the paint? I already paid for it!
CL: Sir, there's no point in getting upset; that's just the way it is. We make plans based upon the idea that you will use all the paint, and when you don't, it just causes us all sorts of problems.
CU: This is crazy! I suppose something terrible will happen if I don't keep painting until after Saturday night?
CL: Yes, sir, it will.
CU: Well, that does it! I'm going somewhere else to buy my paint.
CL: That won't do you any good, sir. We all have the same rules. And thanks for painting with our airlines.
But seriously, folks ....
Air Fare Loopholes - The Ultimate Airline Bluff?
If you want to hire a rental car for 6 days, it is cheaper to pay a full 7 day weekly rate than it is to buy 6 days at the daily rate. And, if you return the car before the full 7 days is up, the rental car company thanks you for giving them back their car early. They don't insist you leave it parked on the street for another day!
Amusement parks sells ride tickets at 70¢ each, or 20 for $12. If you want 18 rides, it is cheaper to buy 20 bulk rides for $12 than 18 single rides for $12.60. But when you leave the amusement park, no one searches you to make sure you have used up all your ride tickets. They're happy to have sold you 20 tickets, even if you didn't use them all.
The local bus operator sells one month passes that are cheaper than buying a bunch of individual tickets for daily travel. They don't insist you ride the bus every day, or even at all! They're happy to sell you the pass whether you use it or not.
But, buy an airline roundtrip ticket and the airline claims that you must fly every flight on the ticket you purchased, even though it costs them more money than if you only fly some but not all the flights on the ticket. Why?
The Three Classic Loopholes
These are the three classic loopholes in the airlines' current fare rules:
Back to Back Ticketing - This is primarily a way to avoid the "stay over a Saturday night" requirement. For example, let's consider the following travel needs: In 3 weeks time, you want to fly to Syracuse on Monday, and return back home on Thursday.
Another 2 weeks later, you want to fly to Syracuse again, travelling there on Tuesday and returning home on Friday.
Because neither itinerary includes a "stay over a Saturday night", the chances are that none of the discounted fares will apply, and instead of paying $200 - 400 per roundtrip, you might be paying $600 - 900. So, this is how the back-to-back ticketing works: You buy a ticket that has you travelling from home to Syracuse on the Monday of your first trip, and returning home again from Syracuse on the Friday of the second trip. You buy a second ticket that has you traveling from Syracuse to the city you live in on the Thursday of your first trip, and then returning back to Syracuse on the Tuesday of your second trip.
What does this mean? You now have 2 tickets, each of which include a Saturday night stay, and so probably qualify for the lowest fare. And you've saved hundreds of dollars, too.
On the face of it, these are two totally proper tickets - you're flying every sector of every ticket. But the airlines claim that they can control everything you do, even when you're not flying on the tickets that you bought! They want you to pay the highest possible fare, not the lowest possible fare, for your travels.
Throwaway Ticketing - This is a slightly darker variation on the back to back ticket example. In this case, let's again suppose that you want to fly to Syracuse, but this time, you only need to travel there once. The price for your "no Saturday night stay" fare is $650. The price for a regular roundtrip fare with a Saturday night stay is $285.
So, what you do is you buy a ticket to travel to Syracuse on the day you wish to fly there, and with a return flight a couple of weeks later. Then you buy a second ticket for travel from Syracuse back home on the day you want to actually fly home, and book a flight back to Syracuse a couple of weeks further out.
You use the first half of your first ticket and then throw away the other half of it. You use the first half of the second ticket and throw away its second half. You've spent $285x2 = $570, which is a decent saving compared to the $650 full fare.
Throwaway Ticketing - Bonus Hint
You can improve your savings, and make it harder for the airline to realise what you're doing, if you make the second half of each ticket not be a simple return back to the place you started your travel from, but instead, a flight to somewhere else that is in a different location and which costs less to fly to. That way, your total ticket cost is lower (due to a cheaper throwaway flight) and it is less obvious to an airline computer audit that you're doing throwaway tickets.
As for the airline, its costs have been halved. It no longer needs to pay the costs associated with flying you on the other half of the flights you booked and paid for - you'd think they'd be pleased! Not only does it save the costs associated with your cancelled flights, but it can also sell the same seats a second time to some other passenger - you'd think they'd be delighted.
But, no, the airlines stubbornly insist that "if you paid for it, you've got to fly it, whether you want to or not"! Their insistence on controlling what you do is only one gentle step removed from coercion and false imprisonment!
Hidden City Fares - In this example, let's say that you live on the west coast, and the fare to Syracuse is more expensive than the fare all the way to New York (a very common situation!). So, you book your itinerary such that your travel includes a stop in Syracuse, and, when the plane arrives in Syracuse, you simply walk off the plane and out of the terminal. Fortunately airport security presently only checks that you have a valid ticket to fly out of airports before letting you enter - they don't (yet?) check that you have a valid ticket to arrive into an airport before letting you leave!
Note that this only works if you do not check luggage - if you check luggage, the airline will of course check it all the way to your official destination. Either carry it on to the plane or use one of the new luggage transportation services such as Luggage Express or Virtual Bellhop that will save you having to check luggage, at a cost of about $50 per piece.
This also only works if you don't want to use all the other flights on your ticket, because as soon as the airline detects an unflown flight, it will cancel all other flights on your itinerary. But if you're using a throwaway ticket, that's not a problem.
No One Forces the Airlines to Sell Cheaper Roundtrip Tickets
Let's understand one thing up front. This is a "problem" entirely of the airlines' own making. It is a very strange piece of pricing logic to sell two units of any product for less then the price of a single unit of the identical same product! But what changes the situation from strange to arrogant lunacy is that, after having set themselves up so as to encourage people to buy roundtrip tickets, whether they need to travel all segments of their journey or not, the airlines try and police your use of the ticket and demand you fly every flight, and also restrict your ability to fly on other flights, on other tickets, during your first journey.
What Happens if You Get Caught?
Reportedly, if the airline detects you are trying to use back to back or throwaway tickets, they will probably cancel the ticket you are using and require you to buy a new (most expensive possible) ticket to complete your travels. If they detect this before you travel, they might contact you in advance, or they might just wait to trap you at the gate when your options are most restricted. If they detect this after you have completed your travel, they might take away some or all of your accumulated frequent flier miles. Some people suggest that the airlines will charge the extra fare that they claim you owe them to any credit card of yours that they might have on file. (This may merely be an "urban legend".)
However, one thing the airlines delight in doing is turning around and charging the travel agent that sold you the ticket the difference in fare between what you paid and what the airlines claim you should have paid! They essentially tell the travel agency "either you pay us this money or you'll never issue one of our tickets again"! Doesn't give travel agencies much choice, does it?
Wanted : A Brave Volunteer!
There you are - its 5pm on a Friday afternoon, you're at the airport gate and about to fly home for the weekend when the airline says "sorry, but it will cost you another $500 to get on the plane because you broke our fare rules." What are you going to do? Stay in that far away city for months or years while you file a law suit and spend tens of thousands of dollars (or even much more - you know the airlines will fight you every step of the way) to force the airline to accept your ticket? Of course not. You're going to give the airline the $500 and rush onboard. Wanted: A volunteer to agree to bring a major test case against an airline!
Reductio Ad Absurdum
Imagine this. You fly half a roundtrip ticket but for some reason are unable to complete your journey. For example, perhaps your ticket was good for a maximum one month stay, and the cost of getting it extended for a longer stay is greater than some other way of travelling back home. So, you go to the airline and ask for a refund on the unused half of the ticket. Okay - so I joke - the chances of getting money back on a discount ticket are minimal; but you hope to perhaps get a credit for future travel. Instead, the airline demands you pay them more money for the privilege of not flying. Or call the cops and file criminal charges against you. Or announce that, even though you're a super-elite quadrillion mile frequent flier with them, with enough miles in your account to fly to the moon and back, they're closing your frequent flier account and you forfeit all your miles!
It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? But the airlines claim that their "contract of carriage" gives them the right to insist on this. Let's examine this issue.
Legalese - the Airline Side of the Game
The airlines attempt to include language into their Contract of Carriage to force you to fly all flights you book and pay for. Stated simply, the airlines seem to be saying that they forbid you to buy the cheapest fare they have on offer. They are trying to control how you use the ticket you have purchased. And now for the great big unknown: Are these terms enforceable in a court of law? Just because something is written in a contract doesn't make it enforceable. Many different types of provisions in contracts are either illegal or unenforceable, and indeed many standard contracts are often substantially rewritten by the courts if either party is trying to enforce or contest them.
In addition to the language in their contracts, some states have laws that include, under the criminal definition of "theft of services" the act of failing to pay the legal fare for air transportation. If you somehow sneak onto a plane and don't pay anything for a journey, then in some states you have clearly committed the crime of stealing an airline service. But what about if you legally buy a ticket, direct from the airline, and then don't fly all the flights on the ticket? You've actually used fewer services than you bought! Is that a crime? Attorneys are unclear about the finest shades of law underlying such a situation, but most generally concede that it would be very hard to get a jury to convict you.
What Do the Courts Say?
There have been very few situations where the courts have had an opportunity to rule on these issues and there has never been a situation where an appellate court has made a decision that would be influential or binding on future situations. It would seem that the airlines are reluctant to have their contracts of carriage tested in court, and prefer to rely on the bluff that, most of the time, seems to succeed. Indeed, one reader tells about a time when he got into an argument when leaving a flight at an earlier point (on a hidden city ticket). He encouraged the airline to sue him, but nothing came of it.
In one civil case (which the traveler brought to court, not the airline), the court ruled against the airline. The court ordered Delta to give back the frequent flier mileage it had impounded from the traveller as a penalty for the use of hidden city fares. Delta didn't just lose, but suffered a massive and decisive defeat. This suggests that the airlines are on shaky legal ground.
An attorney that specialises in travel-related law says that he has brought a number of actions against airlines in the past. He says that the airlines resist all the way to the courtroom door, and then, just as the case is about to be heard, settle out of court so as to avoid getting a case on the record. Unfortunately, the terms of the settlement are always required to be confidential as part of the settlement agreement, so there is nothing official for anyone to go on here, other than - well, shall we say, a vague feeling that the airline settlements may tend to be favourable for the passenger!
In May 2002 a Federal Court judge in Detroit certified a class action brought by a group of passengers accusing Delta, Northwest, and US Airways of acting in a conspiracy and of maintaining monopoly prices on routes to their hub airports by refusing to allow passengers to do hidden city ticketing. The airlines contested the class certification, claiming that the passengers should be required to sue individually. They claimed that the facts of the individual claims are too diverse to be tried collectively. The lawsuit presents "highly generalised hub-based evidence, which lumped 234 separate antitrust markets into a one-size-fits-all analysis," lawyers for Delta and Northwest said in court papers. This has always been the airlines' first line of defense - to make any lawsuit too small and trivial to justify the cost of bringing it against them. In November 2002, the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals refused to hear the airlines' appeal against the action being certified as a class action. In June 2003, the US Supreme Court also refused to hear the airlines' appeal, meaning that this action will now proceed. The plaintiffs are seeking damages of almost $1.5 billion, which under anti-trust law would triple to $4.4 billion if the case is won. It will probably be several more years before the case is heard and appealed and appealed.
Travel Agencies - The Meat in the Sandwich
If you're going to try and exploit airfare loopholes, it would be a kindness not to buy the tickets through a travel agency - airlines will typically then charge, not you the traveller, but the travel agency for the extra fare cost. That was bad enough when travel agents made 5% on selling you a ticket. They make $10 on selling you a $200 ticket, then the airline charges then a $500 penalty for doing so - a totally disproportionate charge! But now, with agencies earning no commission at all, having the airline fine them for something they have no control over seems extreme.
May I suggest you buy your tickets direct from the airline itself, or from their website. Imagine the pleasure you'll get from telling an airline gate agent "Wwhat do you mean, my ticket is invalid? You people sold it to me yourself!" Former airline employees have even confessed to me that their airline deliberately turned a blind eye to such practices in the past (while still fining travel agencies that did the same thing).
A More Legal Variation of Back to Backs
The more closely legal your strategy is, the less likely it is to attract negative scrutiny. Using again my Syracuse examples, let's say that you fly regularly to Syracuse for each working week, but return home for the weekends. Here is a close-to-100% legal way of enjoying back to back tickets. Buy a one way ticket from home to Syracuse. Then, buy roundtrip tickets from Syracuse back home for each weekend, and back to Syracuse again. You are now traveling on each ticket, in perfect order, with no other tickets in the middle. But the airline audit computers may still spot this behaviour, and they might have a confrontation with you, if they know that your home address is not in Syracuse. How would they know this? By your frequent flier details!
Frequent Flier Numbers Tell All
The easiest way for an airline to track everything you do is by your frequent flier number. This immediately enables the airline to conveniently match up all the tickets you buy (and they know from where you bought each ticket, when you made the booking, when you paid for the ticket, and everything else about your travels) and the way you use them, and where you live. If you want to "stay under the radar screen," then any dubious ticket you use must not contain your frequent flier number. Don't feel bad about this - the money you save is worth a great deal more than the miles you lose. The key thing is to make it difficult for the airlines to match your various flights up with each other. Frequent flier numbers make this easy.
Joe Smith and Joseph Smith, at Home and at Work
Make it more difficult for the airline to match your travels. Do some of your travelling with one variant of your name, and the rest of your travelling with a different variant. Maybe your name is Mary Susan Jones. Who isn't to know that you prefer to be called Susan rather than Mary? As long as your driver's license or other photo ID such as passport shows both names in full, sometimes buy tickets as Mary Jones and sometimes as Susan Jones. Misspelling or transposing a couple of letters in your last name seems to foil their computers as well.
And, to encourage the appearance of different personas, use a home phone number for one variation of your name and a business phone number for the other. Sometimes use a cellphone number. Buy the tickets from different agencies or, better still, when buying dubious tickets, buy them direct from the airline so as to be able to say "but you sold me the ticket yourself and never told me I couldn't do this."
Don't forget to use different credit cards, too! Remember, anything that goes into your airline record can be matched against other records, so try and keep your two personalities as different from each other as possible, with little or nothing in common that could match them together.
Keep a Low Profile at the Airport
Conventional wisdom says to be as friendly as possible with gate agents in the hope of being remembered and therefore being more likely to get upgrades. But, if you're trying to beat their systems, try to avoid being recognised by airline gate agents. You don't want them to get curious about your travel patterns. It is fine to be as friendly as you like with the cabin crews on board, but avoid the gate agents. There are exceptions to this situation, of course, but don't rely on this, though it seems some airline people have retained some common sense - they'd rather have all of your business, even at low yield, as this story confirms :
Had an interesting experience with American several years ago, at a time when I was flying from home to Chicago and back about 50 times a year, using back-to-back round trip tickets to hold the costs within reason. At the time American had a downtown ticket office in my home city, and when I came in to pick up my tickets, the lady at the desk gave me sort of a funny look ... like a "keep your mouth shut, dummy." I realized that a supervisor from Dallas was in the back room, only a few feet away, and could hear all our conversation.
He came out, we chatted a bit, and he remarked that I must fly American a lot, and we got into a discussion about some of their weird rules. He said "The suits in Dallas don't have any understanding of the real world. They put in idiotic rules to forbid back to back tickets, without understanding that if they try to enforce them, they wind up losing half the business they do with the passenger, since he can use AA for one set of tickets and United for the other." He continued "Not only do we lose half the revenue we have been getting, the passenger gets a premium status with a competitor, and maybe winds up liking them better than they do AA. They are so arrogant in HQ they just don't have a clue about the real world."
Did he know I was doing that? I don't know. He might have. My friend at the desk said later he had been looking at records of some of their Platinum customers, and it may have jumped out at him. But what I do know is that he had a lot better understanding of his customers than his rule-making bosses in Dallas.
The Beauty of Competition - and the Danger of Cooperation
This is the closest to a bulletproof strategy that exists.
Fly two different airlines for the two halves of your travel. The chances of two completely unrelated airlines being able to look and see what your travels are like on each other are minimal to zero - for example, it is highly unlikely that American would allow Delta to access their computer flight records. But the chance of an airline being able to see what you are doing with a partner airline is much greater if you use the same frequent flier number with both airlines. For example, don't fly Northwest one way and Alaska the other way and use your same Alaska frequent flier number with both airlines. Don't fly on two Star Alliance (or Oneworld) partner carriers.
Summary
Can the airlines legally require you to buy the highest, rather than lowest, fare applicable to your travels? The airlines insist they can, and because they control who gets on their plane, they have the ability to enforce this - "might makes right" seems to be their strongest claim. As to the ultimate legality of their case, they have conspicuously avoided any opportunity to have their claim tested in court. But, if you feel that the airlines are wrong in their claim, and choose to fly in the way that suits you and gives you the lowest cost, you are probably best advised to do so in an inconspicuous manner so as to avoid the risk of a nasty confrontation at the gate just as your flight is about to depart, or unless you have the time and money to become a "test case" through the courts.
Customer (CU): Hi, how much is your paint?
Clerk (CL). Well, sir, that all depends.
CU. Depends on what?
CL: Actually, a lot of things.
CU: How about giving me an average price?
CL: Wow, that's too hard a question. The lowest price is $9 a litre, and we have 150 different prices up to $200 a litre.
CU: What's the difference in the paint?
CL: Oh, there isn't any difference, it's all the same paint.
CU: Well, then, I'd like some of that $9 paint.
CL: Well, first I need to ask you a few questions. When do you intend to use it?
CU: I want to paint tomorrow, on my day off.
CL: Sir, the paint for tomorrow is the $200 paint.
CU: What? When would I have to paint in order to get the $9 version?
CL: That would be in three weeks, but you will also have to agree to start painting before Friday of that week and continue painting until at least Sunday.
CU: You've got to be kidding!
CL: Sir, we don't kid around here. Of course I'll have to check to see if we have any of that paint available before I can sell it to you.
CU: What do you mean, check to see if you can sell it to me? You have shelves full of the stuff, I can see it right there.
CL: Just because you can see it doesn't mean that we have it. It may be the same paint, but we sell only a certain number of litres on any given weekend. Oh, and by the way, the price just went up to $12.
CU: You mean the price went up while we were talking?
CL: Yes, sir. You see, we change prices and rules thousands of times a day, and since you haven't actually walked out of the store with your paint yet, we just decided to change. Unless you want the same thing to happen again, I would suggest that you get on with your purchase. How many litres do you want?
CU: I don't know exactly. Maybe five litres. Maybe I should buy six litres just to make sure I have enough.
CL: Oh, no, sir, you can't do that. If you buy the paint and then don't use it, you will be liable for penalties and possible confiscation of the paint you already have.
CU: What?
CL: That's right. We can sell you enough paint to do your kitchen, bathroom, hall and north bedroom, but if you stop painting before you do the bedroom, you will be in violation of our tariffs.
CU: But what does it matter to you whether I use all the paint? I already paid for it!
CL: Sir, there's no point in getting upset; that's just the way it is. We make plans based upon the idea that you will use all the paint, and when you don't, it just causes us all sorts of problems.
CU: This is crazy! I suppose something terrible will happen if I don't keep painting until after Saturday night?
CL: Yes, sir, it will.
CU: Well, that does it! I'm going somewhere else to buy my paint.
CL: That won't do you any good, sir. We all have the same rules. And thanks for painting with our airlines.
But seriously, folks ....
Air Fare Loopholes - The Ultimate Airline Bluff?
If you want to hire a rental car for 6 days, it is cheaper to pay a full 7 day weekly rate than it is to buy 6 days at the daily rate. And, if you return the car before the full 7 days is up, the rental car company thanks you for giving them back their car early. They don't insist you leave it parked on the street for another day!
Amusement parks sells ride tickets at 70¢ each, or 20 for $12. If you want 18 rides, it is cheaper to buy 20 bulk rides for $12 than 18 single rides for $12.60. But when you leave the amusement park, no one searches you to make sure you have used up all your ride tickets. They're happy to have sold you 20 tickets, even if you didn't use them all.
The local bus operator sells one month passes that are cheaper than buying a bunch of individual tickets for daily travel. They don't insist you ride the bus every day, or even at all! They're happy to sell you the pass whether you use it or not.
But, buy an airline roundtrip ticket and the airline claims that you must fly every flight on the ticket you purchased, even though it costs them more money than if you only fly some but not all the flights on the ticket. Why?
The Three Classic Loopholes
These are the three classic loopholes in the airlines' current fare rules:
Back to Back Ticketing - This is primarily a way to avoid the "stay over a Saturday night" requirement. For example, let's consider the following travel needs: In 3 weeks time, you want to fly to Syracuse on Monday, and return back home on Thursday.
Another 2 weeks later, you want to fly to Syracuse again, travelling there on Tuesday and returning home on Friday.
Because neither itinerary includes a "stay over a Saturday night", the chances are that none of the discounted fares will apply, and instead of paying $200 - 400 per roundtrip, you might be paying $600 - 900. So, this is how the back-to-back ticketing works: You buy a ticket that has you travelling from home to Syracuse on the Monday of your first trip, and returning home again from Syracuse on the Friday of the second trip. You buy a second ticket that has you traveling from Syracuse to the city you live in on the Thursday of your first trip, and then returning back to Syracuse on the Tuesday of your second trip.
What does this mean? You now have 2 tickets, each of which include a Saturday night stay, and so probably qualify for the lowest fare. And you've saved hundreds of dollars, too.
On the face of it, these are two totally proper tickets - you're flying every sector of every ticket. But the airlines claim that they can control everything you do, even when you're not flying on the tickets that you bought! They want you to pay the highest possible fare, not the lowest possible fare, for your travels.
Throwaway Ticketing - This is a slightly darker variation on the back to back ticket example. In this case, let's again suppose that you want to fly to Syracuse, but this time, you only need to travel there once. The price for your "no Saturday night stay" fare is $650. The price for a regular roundtrip fare with a Saturday night stay is $285.
So, what you do is you buy a ticket to travel to Syracuse on the day you wish to fly there, and with a return flight a couple of weeks later. Then you buy a second ticket for travel from Syracuse back home on the day you want to actually fly home, and book a flight back to Syracuse a couple of weeks further out.
You use the first half of your first ticket and then throw away the other half of it. You use the first half of the second ticket and throw away its second half. You've spent $285x2 = $570, which is a decent saving compared to the $650 full fare.
Throwaway Ticketing - Bonus Hint
You can improve your savings, and make it harder for the airline to realise what you're doing, if you make the second half of each ticket not be a simple return back to the place you started your travel from, but instead, a flight to somewhere else that is in a different location and which costs less to fly to. That way, your total ticket cost is lower (due to a cheaper throwaway flight) and it is less obvious to an airline computer audit that you're doing throwaway tickets.
As for the airline, its costs have been halved. It no longer needs to pay the costs associated with flying you on the other half of the flights you booked and paid for - you'd think they'd be pleased! Not only does it save the costs associated with your cancelled flights, but it can also sell the same seats a second time to some other passenger - you'd think they'd be delighted.
But, no, the airlines stubbornly insist that "if you paid for it, you've got to fly it, whether you want to or not"! Their insistence on controlling what you do is only one gentle step removed from coercion and false imprisonment!
Hidden City Fares - In this example, let's say that you live on the west coast, and the fare to Syracuse is more expensive than the fare all the way to New York (a very common situation!). So, you book your itinerary such that your travel includes a stop in Syracuse, and, when the plane arrives in Syracuse, you simply walk off the plane and out of the terminal. Fortunately airport security presently only checks that you have a valid ticket to fly out of airports before letting you enter - they don't (yet?) check that you have a valid ticket to arrive into an airport before letting you leave!
Note that this only works if you do not check luggage - if you check luggage, the airline will of course check it all the way to your official destination. Either carry it on to the plane or use one of the new luggage transportation services such as Luggage Express or Virtual Bellhop that will save you having to check luggage, at a cost of about $50 per piece.
This also only works if you don't want to use all the other flights on your ticket, because as soon as the airline detects an unflown flight, it will cancel all other flights on your itinerary. But if you're using a throwaway ticket, that's not a problem.
No One Forces the Airlines to Sell Cheaper Roundtrip Tickets
Let's understand one thing up front. This is a "problem" entirely of the airlines' own making. It is a very strange piece of pricing logic to sell two units of any product for less then the price of a single unit of the identical same product! But what changes the situation from strange to arrogant lunacy is that, after having set themselves up so as to encourage people to buy roundtrip tickets, whether they need to travel all segments of their journey or not, the airlines try and police your use of the ticket and demand you fly every flight, and also restrict your ability to fly on other flights, on other tickets, during your first journey.
What Happens if You Get Caught?
Reportedly, if the airline detects you are trying to use back to back or throwaway tickets, they will probably cancel the ticket you are using and require you to buy a new (most expensive possible) ticket to complete your travels. If they detect this before you travel, they might contact you in advance, or they might just wait to trap you at the gate when your options are most restricted. If they detect this after you have completed your travel, they might take away some or all of your accumulated frequent flier miles. Some people suggest that the airlines will charge the extra fare that they claim you owe them to any credit card of yours that they might have on file. (This may merely be an "urban legend".)
However, one thing the airlines delight in doing is turning around and charging the travel agent that sold you the ticket the difference in fare between what you paid and what the airlines claim you should have paid! They essentially tell the travel agency "either you pay us this money or you'll never issue one of our tickets again"! Doesn't give travel agencies much choice, does it?
Wanted : A Brave Volunteer!
There you are - its 5pm on a Friday afternoon, you're at the airport gate and about to fly home for the weekend when the airline says "sorry, but it will cost you another $500 to get on the plane because you broke our fare rules." What are you going to do? Stay in that far away city for months or years while you file a law suit and spend tens of thousands of dollars (or even much more - you know the airlines will fight you every step of the way) to force the airline to accept your ticket? Of course not. You're going to give the airline the $500 and rush onboard. Wanted: A volunteer to agree to bring a major test case against an airline!
Reductio Ad Absurdum
Imagine this. You fly half a roundtrip ticket but for some reason are unable to complete your journey. For example, perhaps your ticket was good for a maximum one month stay, and the cost of getting it extended for a longer stay is greater than some other way of travelling back home. So, you go to the airline and ask for a refund on the unused half of the ticket. Okay - so I joke - the chances of getting money back on a discount ticket are minimal; but you hope to perhaps get a credit for future travel. Instead, the airline demands you pay them more money for the privilege of not flying. Or call the cops and file criminal charges against you. Or announce that, even though you're a super-elite quadrillion mile frequent flier with them, with enough miles in your account to fly to the moon and back, they're closing your frequent flier account and you forfeit all your miles!
It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? But the airlines claim that their "contract of carriage" gives them the right to insist on this. Let's examine this issue.
Legalese - the Airline Side of the Game
The airlines attempt to include language into their Contract of Carriage to force you to fly all flights you book and pay for. Stated simply, the airlines seem to be saying that they forbid you to buy the cheapest fare they have on offer. They are trying to control how you use the ticket you have purchased. And now for the great big unknown: Are these terms enforceable in a court of law? Just because something is written in a contract doesn't make it enforceable. Many different types of provisions in contracts are either illegal or unenforceable, and indeed many standard contracts are often substantially rewritten by the courts if either party is trying to enforce or contest them.
In addition to the language in their contracts, some states have laws that include, under the criminal definition of "theft of services" the act of failing to pay the legal fare for air transportation. If you somehow sneak onto a plane and don't pay anything for a journey, then in some states you have clearly committed the crime of stealing an airline service. But what about if you legally buy a ticket, direct from the airline, and then don't fly all the flights on the ticket? You've actually used fewer services than you bought! Is that a crime? Attorneys are unclear about the finest shades of law underlying such a situation, but most generally concede that it would be very hard to get a jury to convict you.
What Do the Courts Say?
There have been very few situations where the courts have had an opportunity to rule on these issues and there has never been a situation where an appellate court has made a decision that would be influential or binding on future situations. It would seem that the airlines are reluctant to have their contracts of carriage tested in court, and prefer to rely on the bluff that, most of the time, seems to succeed. Indeed, one reader tells about a time when he got into an argument when leaving a flight at an earlier point (on a hidden city ticket). He encouraged the airline to sue him, but nothing came of it.
In one civil case (which the traveler brought to court, not the airline), the court ruled against the airline. The court ordered Delta to give back the frequent flier mileage it had impounded from the traveller as a penalty for the use of hidden city fares. Delta didn't just lose, but suffered a massive and decisive defeat. This suggests that the airlines are on shaky legal ground.
An attorney that specialises in travel-related law says that he has brought a number of actions against airlines in the past. He says that the airlines resist all the way to the courtroom door, and then, just as the case is about to be heard, settle out of court so as to avoid getting a case on the record. Unfortunately, the terms of the settlement are always required to be confidential as part of the settlement agreement, so there is nothing official for anyone to go on here, other than - well, shall we say, a vague feeling that the airline settlements may tend to be favourable for the passenger!
In May 2002 a Federal Court judge in Detroit certified a class action brought by a group of passengers accusing Delta, Northwest, and US Airways of acting in a conspiracy and of maintaining monopoly prices on routes to their hub airports by refusing to allow passengers to do hidden city ticketing. The airlines contested the class certification, claiming that the passengers should be required to sue individually. They claimed that the facts of the individual claims are too diverse to be tried collectively. The lawsuit presents "highly generalised hub-based evidence, which lumped 234 separate antitrust markets into a one-size-fits-all analysis," lawyers for Delta and Northwest said in court papers. This has always been the airlines' first line of defense - to make any lawsuit too small and trivial to justify the cost of bringing it against them. In November 2002, the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals refused to hear the airlines' appeal against the action being certified as a class action. In June 2003, the US Supreme Court also refused to hear the airlines' appeal, meaning that this action will now proceed. The plaintiffs are seeking damages of almost $1.5 billion, which under anti-trust law would triple to $4.4 billion if the case is won. It will probably be several more years before the case is heard and appealed and appealed.
Travel Agencies - The Meat in the Sandwich
If you're going to try and exploit airfare loopholes, it would be a kindness not to buy the tickets through a travel agency - airlines will typically then charge, not you the traveller, but the travel agency for the extra fare cost. That was bad enough when travel agents made 5% on selling you a ticket. They make $10 on selling you a $200 ticket, then the airline charges then a $500 penalty for doing so - a totally disproportionate charge! But now, with agencies earning no commission at all, having the airline fine them for something they have no control over seems extreme.
May I suggest you buy your tickets direct from the airline itself, or from their website. Imagine the pleasure you'll get from telling an airline gate agent "Wwhat do you mean, my ticket is invalid? You people sold it to me yourself!" Former airline employees have even confessed to me that their airline deliberately turned a blind eye to such practices in the past (while still fining travel agencies that did the same thing).
A More Legal Variation of Back to Backs
The more closely legal your strategy is, the less likely it is to attract negative scrutiny. Using again my Syracuse examples, let's say that you fly regularly to Syracuse for each working week, but return home for the weekends. Here is a close-to-100% legal way of enjoying back to back tickets. Buy a one way ticket from home to Syracuse. Then, buy roundtrip tickets from Syracuse back home for each weekend, and back to Syracuse again. You are now traveling on each ticket, in perfect order, with no other tickets in the middle. But the airline audit computers may still spot this behaviour, and they might have a confrontation with you, if they know that your home address is not in Syracuse. How would they know this? By your frequent flier details!
Frequent Flier Numbers Tell All
The easiest way for an airline to track everything you do is by your frequent flier number. This immediately enables the airline to conveniently match up all the tickets you buy (and they know from where you bought each ticket, when you made the booking, when you paid for the ticket, and everything else about your travels) and the way you use them, and where you live. If you want to "stay under the radar screen," then any dubious ticket you use must not contain your frequent flier number. Don't feel bad about this - the money you save is worth a great deal more than the miles you lose. The key thing is to make it difficult for the airlines to match your various flights up with each other. Frequent flier numbers make this easy.
Joe Smith and Joseph Smith, at Home and at Work
Make it more difficult for the airline to match your travels. Do some of your travelling with one variant of your name, and the rest of your travelling with a different variant. Maybe your name is Mary Susan Jones. Who isn't to know that you prefer to be called Susan rather than Mary? As long as your driver's license or other photo ID such as passport shows both names in full, sometimes buy tickets as Mary Jones and sometimes as Susan Jones. Misspelling or transposing a couple of letters in your last name seems to foil their computers as well.
And, to encourage the appearance of different personas, use a home phone number for one variation of your name and a business phone number for the other. Sometimes use a cellphone number. Buy the tickets from different agencies or, better still, when buying dubious tickets, buy them direct from the airline so as to be able to say "but you sold me the ticket yourself and never told me I couldn't do this."
Don't forget to use different credit cards, too! Remember, anything that goes into your airline record can be matched against other records, so try and keep your two personalities as different from each other as possible, with little or nothing in common that could match them together.
Keep a Low Profile at the Airport
Conventional wisdom says to be as friendly as possible with gate agents in the hope of being remembered and therefore being more likely to get upgrades. But, if you're trying to beat their systems, try to avoid being recognised by airline gate agents. You don't want them to get curious about your travel patterns. It is fine to be as friendly as you like with the cabin crews on board, but avoid the gate agents. There are exceptions to this situation, of course, but don't rely on this, though it seems some airline people have retained some common sense - they'd rather have all of your business, even at low yield, as this story confirms :
Had an interesting experience with American several years ago, at a time when I was flying from home to Chicago and back about 50 times a year, using back-to-back round trip tickets to hold the costs within reason. At the time American had a downtown ticket office in my home city, and when I came in to pick up my tickets, the lady at the desk gave me sort of a funny look ... like a "keep your mouth shut, dummy." I realized that a supervisor from Dallas was in the back room, only a few feet away, and could hear all our conversation.
He came out, we chatted a bit, and he remarked that I must fly American a lot, and we got into a discussion about some of their weird rules. He said "The suits in Dallas don't have any understanding of the real world. They put in idiotic rules to forbid back to back tickets, without understanding that if they try to enforce them, they wind up losing half the business they do with the passenger, since he can use AA for one set of tickets and United for the other." He continued "Not only do we lose half the revenue we have been getting, the passenger gets a premium status with a competitor, and maybe winds up liking them better than they do AA. They are so arrogant in HQ they just don't have a clue about the real world."
Did he know I was doing that? I don't know. He might have. My friend at the desk said later he had been looking at records of some of their Platinum customers, and it may have jumped out at him. But what I do know is that he had a lot better understanding of his customers than his rule-making bosses in Dallas.
The Beauty of Competition - and the Danger of Cooperation
This is the closest to a bulletproof strategy that exists.
Fly two different airlines for the two halves of your travel. The chances of two completely unrelated airlines being able to look and see what your travels are like on each other are minimal to zero - for example, it is highly unlikely that American would allow Delta to access their computer flight records. But the chance of an airline being able to see what you are doing with a partner airline is much greater if you use the same frequent flier number with both airlines. For example, don't fly Northwest one way and Alaska the other way and use your same Alaska frequent flier number with both airlines. Don't fly on two Star Alliance (or Oneworld) partner carriers.
Summary
Can the airlines legally require you to buy the highest, rather than lowest, fare applicable to your travels? The airlines insist they can, and because they control who gets on their plane, they have the ability to enforce this - "might makes right" seems to be their strongest claim. As to the ultimate legality of their case, they have conspicuously avoided any opportunity to have their claim tested in court. But, if you feel that the airlines are wrong in their claim, and choose to fly in the way that suits you and gives you the lowest cost, you are probably best advised to do so in an inconspicuous manner so as to avoid the risk of a nasty confrontation at the gate just as your flight is about to depart, or unless you have the time and money to become a "test case" through the courts.
-
stopsquawk
- Rank 3
- Posts: 143
- Joined: Sat Jun 24, 2006 7:06 am
Hedley:
It would be polite if you credited the source. You did not write that.
http://www.thetravelinsider.info/2002/0809.htm
It would be polite if you credited the source. You did not write that.
http://www.thetravelinsider.info/2002/0809.htm
-
SierraPoppa
- Rank 4
- Posts: 277
- Joined: Sat Jun 05, 2004 2:53 pm
Not only would it be polite but it is a copyright requirement.stopsquawk wrote:Hedley:
It would be polite if you credited the source. You did not write that.
http://www.thetravelinsider.info/2002/0809.htm
If the moderator is reading this, Hedley's post should be edited heavily to remove most of the article and the link to it posted in its place.
OMFG are you real? How about at worst, a mod post the appropriate credit at the end of Hedley's post.SierraPoppa wrote:Not only would it be polite but it is a copyright requirement.stopsquawk wrote:Hedley:
It would be polite if you credited the source. You did not write that.
http://www.thetravelinsider.info/2002/0809.htm
If the moderator is reading this, Hedley's post should be edited heavily to remove most of the article and the link to it posted in its place.
Amazing that so many people here are dumb enough to think that I actually typed all that crap in 
Time to learn about "cut & paste", children. That, combined with an "internet search engine" (google it) and you're off to the races!
Whenever I cut & paste portions of the CARs here - which I have probably done hundreds of times - does everyone think that I wrote the CARs, too?
Time to learn about "cut & paste", children. That, combined with an "internet search engine" (google it) and you're off to the races!
Whenever I cut & paste portions of the CARs here - which I have probably done hundreds of times - does everyone think that I wrote the CARs, too?
-
stopsquawk
- Rank 3
- Posts: 143
- Joined: Sat Jun 24, 2006 7:06 am
-
Alex YCV
- Rank 4
- Posts: 281
- Joined: Sat Nov 18, 2006 6:41 pm
- Location: The old Cartierville Airport
- Contact:
In a past life I did what is called "yield management" for a car rental company. Like airlines but on a smaller scale, we have all sorts of prices for all sorts of things. Combinations of cars, arrival, depature, length of stay, and all sorts of other things come into play.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yield_management
The price you got for a single flyer on those dates could differ from the price you got for two passangers for a number of reason:
1) Only one seat remaining on a discount fare base for some or all legs of the journey
2) by booking the original single seat, you have changed inventory and that could change the pricing for future bookins
3) Others may have booked, cancelled, or changed thier plans in the time it took you to make the second booking request.
It isn't unusual to make the same fare request 5 times and get 5 different fares. Some systems also do "price averaging" when you have more than one traveler in a group, so that they don't have different ticket prices. So instead of one paying $300 and one paying $500, they offer two tickets at $400 (it is yield neutral). You would need to check all of the fare classes quoted and see if there is any difference.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yield_management
The price you got for a single flyer on those dates could differ from the price you got for two passangers for a number of reason:
1) Only one seat remaining on a discount fare base for some or all legs of the journey
2) by booking the original single seat, you have changed inventory and that could change the pricing for future bookins
3) Others may have booked, cancelled, or changed thier plans in the time it took you to make the second booking request.
It isn't unusual to make the same fare request 5 times and get 5 different fares. Some systems also do "price averaging" when you have more than one traveler in a group, so that they don't have different ticket prices. So instead of one paying $300 and one paying $500, they offer two tickets at $400 (it is yield neutral). You would need to check all of the fare classes quoted and see if there is any difference.
This is a my sig... I hope you like it.
-
snaproll20
- Rank 7
- Posts: 636
- Joined: Tue Jun 01, 2004 7:50 pm
