LCCs selling very low fare tickets

[davidjohnson6]

Sometimes when booking a trip for non-work purposes which has a reasonably tight or otherwise dubious connection, I'll look for a back-up plan in case something is delayed. More often than I expect, I'll find a flight with a LCC 6 or 12 hours later than I want with a fare under £20 (no bags, no extras, just bum on seat) and I'm often inclined to book it as a peace-of-mind-guaranteed-to-get-home option, instead of having to pay a very high last minute get-out-of-jail fare. Of course in most cases, the tight connection does work, and the backup airline ends up with a no-show and gets to keep my money and not pay Govt tax or airport fees

I'm aware of the big push towards ancillary revenue. Is this offering very low fares a deliberate strategy by airlines to attract pax who will no-show, or is it just a case of airlines being desperate to flog seats ?

[S.o.S.]

Very good question dj6. Like the very cheap seats that require bag drop at 04:00. Some will just miss them by accident.

[Asturias56]

I think the aim is to leave no possibility that you have missed any market that you can extract a few dollars from

I 'd guess the ultra ultra cheap tickets would appeal to the plane spotting community - a few years back I knew a couple of guys who would turn up at their local airport - fly to Riga or somewhere, spend 1-8 hours clocking local activity and coming back on either the same plane or an evening lo lo lo .

At one point I was doing a pure bum on seat only flight regularly to meetings on a project in the Netherlands - quite strange and occasionally caught the attention of the Organs of the State but worked a treat

[DaveReidUK]

Is this offering very low fares a deliberate strategy by airlines to attract pax who will no-show, or is it just a case of airlines being desperate to flog seats ?

The difference in cost to the airline depending on whether you show or don't is negligible.

[25F]

I think on one flight in the last couple of years the seat cost was actually less than the APD - so for the two under-16s, the *seat* cost was £0.00.
But of course we needed suitcases for the gubbins required for a week or so ("do you *really* need five books for a week-long stay?").
But surely the point is that the prices are set by the algorithm. And whether through machine learning or human intervention I *suspect* that they are pursuing the retail model of a low "headline" price followed up with hugely profitable "accessories" - a bit like buying a TV and games console at a great price - and then being sold an extended warranty, or an HDMI cable for about three times what it should be.

[Asturias56]

King Gillette made his fortune by giving away Razors with a couple of blades in them - then you paid for years and years and years...............

In modern times it is often cheaper to buy an inkjet printer "on special" as they say in Oz and throw it away once the free cartridges run out.

[PAXboy]

I find it very annoying that so many of them (and other corporates) now want you to work primarily through their 'app'. It is far easier to make/review/print bookings on my desktop computer. We are off on EZY soon and their web site was so slow as to time out multiple times. Then the app would not let me log in but would not tell me why. Eventually the website said that I needed to update my passowrd - perfectly reasonable but the app did not know. Once that was done THEN the app did not know about the booking and I had to 'import it'. Other carriers, and my usual car hire company, have the app updated almost as soon as it is done on the website.

When checking in a person, where it had not copied over the passport details, asking for date of birth but not showing what format they want it. These are small things but are the fundamentals of making your pax happy and want to return. I wonder how much of this is further ways of saving costs?

[25F]

I suspect the app development was out-sourced to developers in Another Place where the culture is *not* to ask questions of the customer because to do so implies that the specification was inadequate, and this is extremely disrespectful.
Of course any developer will tell you that there's *always* holes in the spec, particularly if prepared by management who simply don't know what the developer needs to know - because they're not developers and there will be stuff that's "obvious" to them but they don't have the experience of knowing just how devious things like names and dates and postcodes can be.
Rather the outsourced programmers develop *precisely* what has been specified - and don't go back to the customer to suggest that a 'yyyy-mm-dd' placeholder might be a good idea.
Being a programmer is frustrating - there's so much bad code out there. The "enter card number without spaces" is perhaps the canonical example. In pretty much any language stripping non-numerics from a string is a single line of code. Your card number is printed in groups of four to facilitate readback - but this is then deliberately broken. If the user wants to separate the groups of four with a space, or a dash, or not - let them. At the end of the day it is either valid, or not.

[sherburn2LA]

outsourced programmers develop *precisely* what has been specified

What colour is the sky on that planet ?

[25F]

What colour is the sky on that planet ?
Hah! Phrased badly. Something more like 'they will interpret the spec in a mindlessly literal manner'.

[PAXboy]

That all sounds highly probable. I was working in telecommunications from 1977 to 2003 and very familiar with how people have difficulty setting out what they need as opposed to what they want. Many just wanted the technology itself - without being able to specify what they wanted the technology to achieve.

Today I had problems with another LCC app when I went to update my address. Was easier to do it on their website via PC. Then a website for AirBNB wanted details of booked residents - whilst they highlighted that it was to be dd/mm/yyyy - they did not put in the '/' lines and so my entry was rated as invalid. No opportunity to edit.

[PAXboy]

I recall reading in here some months ago, someone reporting that the LH app - when in the airport - shows you the route to the exact gate. It may only work at their German locations but sounds very good, especially for places like FRA.

The problems of outsourcing is well known to all of BA's customers and they still haven't fixed it properly. We have spoken in here before of the enormous costs of bringing technology into the 2020s BUT ... whilst the upfront cost is high, the long term benefits are also high. One of my closet friends is a high level software development manager and I recall him saying a decade ago that many companies have not yet adjusted to the fact that they are IT companies - who might sell: clothes / paint / books / seats on aircraft. One company who knew this from the start was Amazon. Countless others have not yet made that change.

[Pip_Pip]

One of my closet friends is a high level software development manager

I understand you're embarrassed to admit it, but it's 2022. It's okay to have friends in the IT industry.