Are Airline Booking Sites Fair?
 

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?

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 ...

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.

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.

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.

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

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)

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

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 ...

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

'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.

Sunday?
 

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.