Are Airline Booking Sites Fair?

[Niallo]

Most airlines provide a WEB site for users to book their flights directly with the airline. Also for users to check fares without booking. Do these sites present the same fare to everyone at a given time and for a given flight and date? Or do they present a different fare to each user according to their knowledge of that user, based on their IP address, search history and demographics? ie an estimate of the user's ability to pay?

[PAXboy]

This subject was raised recently in SLF forum, with specific regard to certain LoCos.

Some research was put forward that squashed this urban myth. That said, all airlines now review their prices all the time. If there is one seat at (say) £99. available and you check back two minutes later and it's been booked - you might see £109. It's the correct price for that minute and that status of that flight.

If, at the end of that day, the computer programme says, "Not enough seats sold - lower ten more seats down to £99." Than that also will be correct. Prices are varied for everyone but not varied for you specifically.

That is not to say it's not happening somewhere ...

[ExXB]

It also depends on what you mean by 'fair'.

The 'right' price for any seat is what the punter is prepared to pay. Put it too high and you don't get the booking, put it too low and you spill revenue. As Paxboy says this 'right' price is dynamic and is likely to change frequently, up and down, based on a number of factors.

In the EU it is illegal to price differently based on the location or nationality of the purchaser. (i.e. A London to Paris ticket must be the same price (at the same moment in time) regardless of where in the EU it is purchased.)

You also have airlines price at a level that will drive customers to them to purchase related products. Baggage, seat selection, boarding priority, food and drink costs can easily exceed the ticket price.

It is impossible, with most airlines, to know what the total price of your journey is going to be. But then again you get what you pay for, and with a little planning you can reduce your costs significantly.

If you suspect that an airline is targeting you, there are ways around that. Use a VPN, for example.

[Ancient Observer]

The notions of "fair" and "Aviation ticket prices" are entirely separate notions, and should not be used in the same sentence, unless fair is preceded by NOT.

[25F]

I ran a brief test of the theory that the more interested you are in a certain route / flight the higher the price goes. So I chose the airline most likely, in my opinion, to indulge in this sort of practice, and a route which we've booked from this IP address in the past.

Right at the beginning of the test I had a computer restart coincident with the price dropping from 260GBP to 144GBP overnight. Suspicious, I thought. However I kept plugging away at the booking engine every day for a few days.

Then I used a different browser via a different IP address - and got the exact same prices.

The massive overnight drop was just coincidence, I think.

[Ancient Observer]

Aviation sites use cookies extensively. Always delete all cookies when researching flight costs, (between each attempt to get prices) even with the consolidators.

[Hartington]

This answer relates to "Traditional Airlines" like BA, not the Low Cost carriers like Ryanair.

Forget the web just for a moment. Each flight has 1 or more different class cabins (e.g. First, Business, Premium Economy, Economy). Each of those classes has a number of booking codes represented by a letter of the alphabet. The prices are associated with those letters. The airline can assign any number of seats to a given letter on a specific flight/day. So one day letter A might cost 100 and the next day 90 and the next day 150 and the next day they may decide not to sell any seats at letter A fares.

When a person in a call centre makes an enquiry he will be shown the number of seats available at that instant. If someone else asks for the same flight at another screen 1 second later the response will be identical and it is quite possible for both users to see there is just 1 seat left. Computers love order so if both those users try and grab that 1 seat at the same time the computer will decide which one comes first and one person will get a seat and the other won't. Mind you if the user who has grabbed the seat doesn't complete the transaction (the customer says no thanks) that one seat goes back into the A booking code for someone else to book.

Now let's look at the web. Exactly the same principle applies - two users can see the same response but if they both try and book the one remaining seat one will get it and the other won't. Except it's more complex than that.

The problem is with the increase in the number of transactions that the web generates. The airline mainframes may be fast and have lots of power but their ability is finte. To avoid being overwhelmed the airlines (and the GDS) have contracts with users that impose what's known as a "look to book" ratio. In other words everytime the website makes an enquiry to the airline system it is counted. Every booking is also counted. Divide the number of bookings into the number of enquiries and you get a ratio - the websites are given a number that their ration must not exceed or there will be a bill to the agency for the overage.

So what happens is that the websites cache. They store information about each query they do make and when a query shows the flight is well and truly open they store that fact and when someone else makes an enquiry for the same flight/date/class they look at that stored data (in the cache) and use it rather than sending a new request to the airline. The cache has a lifetime - you can't assume that a request you made three months ago is still valid but the fact remains that when you get an offer it may have been sourced from the cache. The inevitable result is that however clever the cache is you may get an offer and when you say "yes please" and the website goes to the airline system the airline may say no.

Now lob in the fact that the airlines constantly review their pricing. I can't remember the precise statistic, you'll find it somewhere on the ATPCO website, but the number of fares filed and updated every single day is in the multi millions. Those fares are loaded by the airlines to ATPCO, ATPCO redistributes them to other airlines and the GDS those bodies then process the data from ATPCO so that it firs their systems and finally it appears on the airline systems. But some websites have special deals; some of those go via ATPCO but others go direct. It's is totally possible for one website to have a deal for a given seat and another website to have a different deal for the same seat and a 3rd site to have no deal at all and never even see that booking letter. And for those deals that the airlines send to websites sirect the speed to market depends on what systems the website is using and how quickly they update their databases.

Do the travel booking websites use cookies? They might but I doubt it. The complexities and dynamics of the system are such that you don't need cookies to get the sort of results that make people believe cookies are involved.

Now.......

IATA has recently come up with something the call "New Distribution Capability". I'll leave you to read and make your own mind up about that. IATA - New Distribution Capability (NDC) (http://www.iata.org/whatwedo/stb/ndc/Pages/index.aspx)

[radeng]

Should you get the same price via a travel agent as you can get on the web?

[ExXB]

Radeng;

No, not necessarily. Agents with significant volumes are often given 'net' prices that are not available to the normal punter. So the price to the agent can be cheaper than the price to the internet booker. However that net price is what the agent pays the airline, what they charge you could be just about anything ...

[ExXB]

IATA has recently come up with something the call "New Distribution Capability". I'll leave you to read and make your own mind up about that. IATA - New Distribution Capability (NDC) (http://www.iata.org/whatwedo/stb/ndc/Pages/index.aspx)

Thank you for your detailed explanation.

As I understand it IATA's NDC is to give agents the ability to price all the options in a similar way to the airlines. For example some airline's web-sites can quote you the fare, the seat selection fee, the priority booking fee, the in-flight meal fee etc. The agents site can quote you only the fare.

Not everyone is confident that IATA's NDC will work, or will be neutral. But on the other hand it should allow agents to do what is only doable directly on airlines sites at the moment. A lot more than they can do now. The GDSs are certainly suspicious of IATA's intentions, but you need to consider their motivations as well
.

[PAXboy]

Tight Slot. If I may suggest, given Hartington's superb explanation, perhaps this thread should join the forum FAQ?

[Niallo]

Thank you Hartington for that excellent explanation. I can understand that providing a WEB site that may be deluged with fare sniffers would be uneconomic unless a certain percentage were converted to sales. But how does a fares searcher like ITA Matrix succeed, since one can only use it to see routings and fares, not to book flights through it?

[Sober Lark]

When I'm booking a family trip for the 5 of us I sometimes find it to my financial advantage to make two bookings. For example for 3 PAX i'll get a €100 fare and for the remaining 2 I'll get an €120 fare giving a total spend for 5 passengers of €540. If I had booked 5 passengers together all 5 would have breen offered €120 each giving a total spend of €600.

For long haul travel I booked directly with Singapore Airlines AKL-DUB. Fare offered routed us via SIN and LHR. However their booking engine offered what transpired later to be too tight a connection time in LHR resulting in a missed connection and an overnight in LHR so in that case the web site probably wasn't 'fair' to the consumer in offering such a short connection time.

[ExXB]

ITA does exactly what a GDS would do, but as they are not an accredited agency, they cannot issue tickets.

Their calculations are valid at the time they are done, but you should nonetheless hurry if you want to use their quote, by getting their calculations to an agent ASAP

[radeng]

So the airlines charge a booking fee for using a credit card, the travel agent offers the same price and doesn't charge a booking fee....hmm. Nice fiddle!

At one time, garages started charging more if you paid by credit card, but Mrs Thatcher (who some people on Pprune love to hate!) put a stop to that.

[ExXB]

Radeng are you sure the agent doesn't pass along the card fee? I haven't used an agent in years but can't see them not passing along airline imposed charges.

[radeng]

I haven't used an agent for a long time, but my wife's employers do: apparently the agent gets invoiced every month for the total they've spent that month.

This whole business of 'booking fees' is to my mind, dishonest. It's part of the cost of doing business - just as bank charges are!

A good job garages were stopped from charging extra - taking cash encouraged crime, yet they weren't charged higher council rates for that!

[ExXB]

My wife's company also has a deal with a 'major' agency. The have a long list of charges that apply. Since the airlines no-longer pay commission they charge for just about everything. A fee for booking, fee for ticket issuance, a fee for 'printing' ( attaching to an e-mail) an itinerary, fees for hotels, fees for ground transport, fees to scratch their bums. etc.

I'm sure that airline booking/card fees are not absorbed by the agency but who knows. They make considerably more per booking than the days of a 9% commission.

[GrahamO]

'Fair' in the context of the question normally means that the questioner cannot to pay the market rate for something, and want to complain in the hope that others will agree with them.

It rarely happens.

Pay the going rate or start a business of your own and sell at a 'fair' price and watch another group of parasites complain.

[Hartington]

Firstly thanks for the kind words. Two words of warning my be appropriate - I simplified!

I'll try and answer the questions but I'm off out for the evening and then tomorrow AM I have to go away and won't be back until sometime Sunday.

[thing]

Slightly OT but I fly SIA to Oz. I always book direct with them on their website and (as I'm sure you know) SIA's flights to Oz are always chocker. When you book your seat on their seating plan, even if we book 9 months in advance the a/c is almost always nearly full, in all classes. Does this mean that agents are block booking sections of seats?

As an aside I looked at 380 suite availability on our next flight in a couple of weeks. They were full; so I kept advancing the booking as far as I could and I couldn't find an empty suite seat. Which I thought was odd.

[Heathrow Harry]

possibly the airline blocking seats to release at higher prices as demand builds up

[radeng]

I wish I had a product to sell to airlines for which I had a monopoly. I'd charge a 'Receiving order fee', 'invoicing fee', 'bank account crediting fee', 'account servicing fee' etc....the list goes on.

Just being as devious and basically morally dishonest as they are....

[Heathrow Harry]

somewhere on the BBC website there's a clip about how hard it is to use airmiles

[Hartington]

Let's start with IATA NDC. It could be a game changer and I'm not yet sure in what way.

If you build a profile that the airline has access to (and in these days of data sharing who knows where that might be; maybe your buying habits at Tesco?!) the theory seems to be that they will use what they know about your travel habits to make you an offer. What nobody has told me yet is quite what defines an "offer".

It could be that because you always check a bag you might get offered a "free" bag. Or if you usually book economy but, just occasionally, pay for an upgrade that might be a part of your offer.

But there will always be people who have never travelled before and airlines could use that offer by tempting them with freebies the rest of use will be offered at a fee.

And for people who always travel business class the attitude might be we've got them so we'll make them an offer they can refuse!

I have absolutely no idea how it's going to play out.

[Hartington]

It depends where you look. After all you've got airlines, then you have the generalist websites like Opodo and their bricks and mortar equivalents like Trailfinders.

Then life gets interesting. Go for a walk around New Malden and you'll find all sorts of shops selling tickets to Korea. Southall yields Indian sub-continent agencies. When you look beyond the veneer you'll find that many of these establishments aren't agencies in the accepted sense. They're sub-agencies and even sub-sub agencies; the tickets can come from an agency or from contacts with an airline.

As you know, a few years ago airlines stopped paying commission to agencies. That meant agencies had to find a new way of making money. And that means they charge fees. What they charge is up to them. Some are very open about their fees (particularly Business Travel agents). But, because you and I, the average paying punter buying a holiday ticket, expects to see a single price most retail agencies (be the online or bricks and mortar) will quote you a price that includes their fee.

But there have always been "deals" between airlines and agencies. For a good few years in the UK it was possible to buy a ticket which showed the fare that the airline had publicly filed but if you knew where to look it was sometimes possible to work out what the "net net" fare was or the override commission. Deals still exist and the question that it's diffcult to answer is how those deals are used. If an agency has a deal that is better than any other then do they reduce their fare or do they sell at the going price and make more profit?

It's also the case that some airlines take a more laissez faire attitude to pricing that others. Some airlines will give an agency a fare and allow them to set their own selling price whilst others will set the minimum price they want their agents to sell for. The result of all that is that sometimes it can be cheaper to buy a ticket from an agency (be it web or bricks and mortar) than the airline itself.

Then there's the question of cheap versus good value. I'm of the opinion that the cheapest fare can be extremely bad value for money. There are airlines that I would prefer to avoid and I take the view that cheaper fares often require changes and that a non stop is more comfortable, less stressful and safer (only 1 take off and 1 landing) so, for me, the best value is often not the cheapest.

Where a good travel agent comes into his or her own is that they can ask questions and make suggestions. Back in 2001 I went to visit Argentina and the agent I dealt with suggested that instead of flying to Buenos Aires I fly to Sao Paulo because it saved me flying "past" Iguassu and then having to fly back. They are also probably better if you want to go to more than one place. Airline (and online agencies) web sites have "multi city" options but, in my experience airlines sites in particular tend to assume you want to travel with that airline or their alliance partners. When I went to Chile earlier this year I couldn't even get a sensible price out of the BA site to fly London/Sao Paulo/Santiago and then Buenos Aires/London. In the end I bought a BA ticket for their flights London/Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires/London and a separate ticket Sao Paulo/Santiago/Easter Island/Santiago.

It's a badly understood fact that you can buy a ticket from British Airways (oneWorld) that contains not only BA and other oneWorld airlines but also, for instance, United (Star) and Delta (Skyteam) and an agency should be able to help you find when that makes sense. Interline and codeshare is NOT the same and a good agent will understand that.

Then we might choose to look at a low cost carrier (which are generally only available on their own website) and we all know that sometimes the low cost airlines can be more expensive than the network carriers.

But the bottom line is that neither the airline or an online agency or a bricks and mortar agency has the cheapest OR the best value all the time.

[Hartington]

Ah, yes, ITA.

A bit of history first.

In years gone by each airline had a separate fares system. But with improved communications some airlines started to sell their fares systems to other airlines with queries being fired from one airline to the fare quote system of a different airline.

Now, for airlines, fare quotes need to be competitive but they also need to be valid, in accordance with the fare rules. That's particularly true when airline A is providing fare quote services to other airlines. Note I said competitive, not cheapest, airlines may not act like it sometimes but they are commercial entities and want to make money and if cheapest isn't profitable for them maybe they don't want to expose that fare.

ITA started as almost an intellectual exercise for USA fares. They weren't selling their service, just exposing it on the web. Their USP was simple; cheap. If you looked at some of their results you found some weird routings and very long (and short) connections. And initially they were simply fares with no reservations checking so whether you could actually book their fares was an issue.

Word began to spread and the major US airlines and GDS began to take notice to the extent that some systems began to sign contracts with ITA to use their system for some fare quotes.

But the issue about whether some of the ITA quotes make sense except for total cheapskates still comes into play; different systems have slightly different "rules" about what they will and won't display so some ITA quotes get thrown away; it's usually related to the number of miles you have to fly to get that fare compared to the great circle difference. I mean, would you fly from London to Paris via Dusseldorf for a one day round trip which is an example ITA has just offered me with a return via Geneva with an overnight at Geneva?

[Niallo]

Many thx, Hartington for detailed explanations. ITA has always fascinated me because I could not see how it earns any money! However, it is very useful and often gives me a new idea on routing.

[old,not bold]

If the OP's question was "Are airline Booking Sites Unfair", there's only one answer:

http://i243.photobucket.com/albums/ff141/picshooter/Beardump_zpsd0199d10.png

[thing]

possibly the airline blocking seats to release at higher prices as demand builds up

But isn't that stopping people who want to buy them buying them in the first place? If you look at their website and the seats are gone then you would go to another airline surely.

[thing]

somewhere on the BBC website there's a clip about how hard it is to use airmiles

Never had a problem using Krisworld, the SIA one. Just upgraded my return flight from Oz to business at the click of a few mouse things.

[Sober Lark]

Krisworld is Singapore Airlines entertainment system. Krisflyer is their loyalty program. They also have a disloyalty program which they seem to concentrate more on these days.

[thing]

Krisflyer it is, typo on my part. Interested in your comments, never had a problem with SIA, in fact they have been very helpful to me in the past.

[Gargleblaster]

Stay away from such sites at all cost !

If there's trouble with your flight, you want to be dealing directly with the airline rather than go through whichever booking site you may have bought your ticket from. And you hardly save anything anyways.

A few years back, me and dearest wife had a flight cancelled and went through hell due to having bought the ticket through such a site.

[PAXboy]

I totally agree that it is better to book directly with the carrier/hotel/car hire. Before Covid, it was not really a problem to use these sites but with the high levels of canx flights still happening - I think it better to pay extra. I appreciate that, for many, that is not an option. Mostly, of course, every runs smoothly. I still use sites for some hotel bookings but never for flights.

A few years ago, I was in South Africa and driving to CPT for a flight to JNB. I was called by Comair (BA franchisee of late memory!) and told that the a/c had gone tech. Did I want to take the one earlier or the one later? I had this conversation on my Btooth headset as I was turning into the airport and so I could take the earlier flight. Had I booked through another route - I would have had to hope that not all seats had been taken by the time I found out.

[Hartington]

10 years later this subject has raised its' head again!

In the last 10 years some airlines have adopted NDC. I have yet to see much, if any difference in the way I'm being offered fares.
However, in the meantime a new buzz word has arrived - "offer, order". It's part of the idea that airline retailing needs to be dragged into the world of online retailing. Offer, order is seen as being the way websites like Amazon work. We'll see!

Travel agencies are an interesting debate. In the UK they tend to split into two types "business travel" and "leisure travel". Of course they overlap and there are all sorts of sub types. If all you want to do is go from the UK to Europe and stay in one place I think many people will say "I don't need an agency" and I'd be inclined to agree. Certainly, booking direct can have benefits as PAXboy has shown; the risk is that if things do go wrong you don't have the same financial cover that you have with a package.

Then again, a package doesn't necessarily mean it has to be purchased from an agent. For instance, add an hotel (even just one night) or car to a flight on some airline websites and it becomes a package with the financial protections. In one case I booked the flights plus an hotel when I got off the plane and then did the rest of a tour around the USA myself which meant I paid a deposit to the airline and the balance 6 weeks before departure. It also meant that I could cancel (but, yes. I would have lost the deposit but not the whole fare).

Agents may no longer earn commision on the sale of fares but that doesn't mean they take the same fare as the airline and add their fee. Negotiations between airlines and agents continue and it's still possible to find fares equal to or less than the airline fare particularly (but not exclusively) on "ethnic" city pairs.

I'm going to suggest that the vast majority of airline tickets (actually rail, bus, coach, ferry etc.) are one way or simple round trip. There is a market for multi stop itineraries and I've said previously that the airline websites are poor (in my opinion) at meeting that demand - go to an expert agency if you want to go round the world or buy a multi stop even something as simple as flying A to B, making your way to C and then flying back to A. That said, the LCC only sell one way tickets so combing airline XX to fly A to B with a completely separate booking with ZZ from C to A is doable.

I have a love/hate relationship with the alliances. One of my last trips I flew London/Dallas/Austin and then Chicago/London all on American but using British Airways flight numbers. I didn't fly British Airways non-stop to Austin because it was £400 more expensive the day I wanted to fly. I drove across to Houston over the next two days and then needed to get from Houston to Chicago for a long weekend before flying home. American fly the route, so do United. BA wanted to sell me AA (same alliance) but I discovered that if I took a late UA flight I could get first class for the same price as BA/AA wanted for economy (mind you I could have got economy on a UA flight for half what I'd paid for first). In the past I could have got that all on one ticket but I ended up with two (different alliances).

I could go on for hours.

[Hartington]

Virto asks how all these things work. The simple answer is lots of computers linked together. Airlines talk to car hire companies and hotels. Agents talk to airlines, hotels and car hire comanies. Deals get done (the precise nature varies). The seller, be it agency or airline or whoever then takes the prices they've negotiated, adds their profit margin and sells at an "advantageous" price.

A word of warning. UK price protection if you buy a "package" only applies if you buy from a UK company. I've seen websites with ".co.uk" addresses that turn out to be companies in Europe and beyond. Always remember WWW means World Wide Web and know who you are actually dealing with.

As with everything if it is too cheap it is likely to be unrealistic. A specialist dealer in model trains recently circulated a note to the effect that someone had copied his website with all the stock and pictures and was advertising the items normaly priced in hundreds (and even thousands) of dollars at prices like thirty dollars.

[Saintsman]

Some years ago, I used to do some contracting for a large company. I had to use their booking agent, despite the fact that I could usually book the flight much cheaper myself.

It particularly used to annoy me that with a bit of persistence, I could often get business class fares cheaper than premium economy (for long distance, company policy was to use the next class above economy).

[PAXboy]

I had the same problem! Doing a contract in Geneva in 1998, our admin person did not understand how airline bookings work. She phoned up and took what was handed down. Consequently, I once sat in Y knowing that the seat had cost more than in C. This was annoying as I had a carry-on + briefcase and was trapped down the back. Further, I could not collect as many Miles!! Wherever possible, I suggested to the client that I would book and accept their financial limitations, then add to my invoice. At least I could then pick the carrier for Miles/Points. However, one client in HKG insisted on Y and that was irritating!

I very rarely travel on busines now but always book my own accomodation and train, so at least I get points from the credit card.