Selling unconfirmed tickets
 

In the UK and EU, is it possible in any way for an airline to sell "tickets" for unconfirmed/standby seats (making this very clear to the purchaser) for a nonzero cost (but cheaper than a normal ticket) that may be refunded if no seats are available on a flight and is *not* liable to EU261 ? Pax would be told maybe 24 hours before departure if it converted to a real seat or a refund/credit voucher

I imagine the answer is a definite NO, but wondered what happens if the purchaser of an "unconfirmed ticket" signs something digitally to say they acknowledge the variation in terms. Can statute allow this change in contract without imposing the usual rights and duties ?

To those who point to how certain airlines abused the system pre 2004 that led to EU261, I'm thinking instead of an informed consent process whereby pax confirm they understand what standby means

Passenger would get cheaper transport than normal, while airline gets more freedom to fill the plane for revenue. Effectively, EU261 would be unbundled from the ticket to become a potential opt-out in return for money and looser commercial regulation

I realise such a solution might require a lot of legal creativity... so maybe the "tickets" might be sold by a company in an offshore jurisdiction which is not formally owned by the AOC licenced airline but which "advertises" on the airline website and pays "consultancy fees" to the airline

You’re basically describing staff travel (ID90). On your own airline or whatever airline your airline has agreements with. You buy a fully flexible fully refundable lowest of the low priority tickets. If there’s a spare seat you get on. If there isn’t you don’t. You know the rules. But at the same time if you don’t turn up you get your money back.

I’ve never ever heard of it available for non staff though. (nominees of airline employee excepted again dependant on airline and agreement rules). It is an extremely valuable (usually) non contractual benefit.

So yes it must be “legal” (as usually non airline employees can benefit from it). But I can’t see any airline going for it.

How would this be diferent to walking up a nd buying a ticket on the day? You've still been given a specific date/time. They would have a reservation - "reservation" means the fact that the passenger has a ticket, or other proof, which indicates that the reservation has been accepted and registered by the air carrier or tour operator;

Would still be the operator who is responsible - "operating air carrier" means an air carrier that performs or intends to perform a flight under a contract with a passenger or on behalf of another person, legal or natural, having a contract with that passenger;

This used to happen didn't it? I remember arriving on a long distance flight at Heathrow when I didn't want to risk missing the last flight of the day up to Leeds if it was late. As it turned out, we arrived on time. I went to the British Midland ticket desk in terminal one and they sold me a standby ticket. They told me there were a few empty seats and I did make it on to the plane.

Pretty much no chance.

1st question is "What is in it for an airline" and answer is sweet bugger all.

The claim culture would have someone buying these and then going to court.

The claim would be that the airline did not honour their tickets so the lovely holiday to Disneyworld, with great Aunt Jemima, in a wheelchair, plus 4 kids including a nursing baby, was ruined because the airline refused to fly the 7 of them plus 150kgs of luggage for the £1000 they paid for their unconfirmed standby tickets. The claimants will state that the terms and conditions were completely unclear, they didn't read them and would go to court on basis of no win no fee.

Headline will be "Airline abandoned family of 7 including disabled woman and kids at airport" and all the media would be offering to pay for stories.

In Airlines case, why bother as there is no positive return.

Isn't the question simply can an airline avoid its legal obligations by getting a customer to sign away their rights? The stuff about stand by etc isn't relevant.

There is that as well, Airline coerced me into signomg away legal rights.

Ultimately is there a big enough return for the airline, for BA etc >£10 million a year for it to be worth the effort, hassle, management time and legal experts. I doubt if return justifies the effort so why bother.

With the low cost airlines and the internet I don’t think there is much in it for customers or airlines? Offering this kind of “standby” ticket disrupts airline yield management for no return.
Some airlines do offer standby on earlier flights, typically in the US, or free same day changes on their economy+ fares such as BA. Is there an appetite for either party to go further?

DJ6's point is around finding a way to reduce airlines exposure to EU261 - I don't think there is, there will always be a 'contract' between the operater and the pax to 'perform a flight'

I remember BA offering this service (way back when) for a while on LHRJFK. You bought a ticket and then had to call within 24 hours of departure to see if that could be made firm.

brian_dromey

I think this is the key message here, the suggested approach was replaced by yield management approach to selling tickets (staff ID90 tickets excluded), however the current challenge is that the yield management methods are not working in the current demand environment. Airlines are looking at creative ways to raise revenue. This covid storm will most likely be gone by thr end of the year when yield mgt will start working as intended again...

Problem I can see with converting to " a real seat" at STD -24 hours the airline has lost the ability to sell that seat closer to STD to somebody willing to pay more...so we're back to the revenue management angle again.

FWIW most staff standby tickets are never converted into real seats until you're sat on the aircraft and the doors are closed..

I would argue that EU261 disrupts what should be the normal yield management process. An airline will have a good idea of noshows... but the possibility of a claim makes airlines err on the side of caution and thus restrain overbooking so as to expect a few seats spare when leaving the gate

A non-EU261 standby pax would have to pay at the time of booking, NOT the day of travel.... the decision optionality accrues to the airline, not passenger. This means an airline could sell perhaps 10 more seats on a B738 (dependent on route) to standby pax - so push load factor from a pre-Covid *system-wide average* of 96% to 99%. Two months before departure, there is a significant level of uncertainty about ticket sales.... at T-24h it should be much easier to predict how many last minute ticket sales (including weather or strike related disruption) versus potential standby-to-confirmed conversion seats.

Additionally, standby tickets could be released gradually (max 2 pax per day) during the 9 months prior to departure - makes it less accessible for large groups who can't be split up, prohibit sales to under-18s and would reduce tariff abuse. Thus it should be very much a "top up" part of the ticket sales process

It used to work OK - IIRC one of the reasons it disappeared was that Security wanted to know who was flying where and when ahead of time

davidjohnson6

I don’t understand the problem you are trying to solve here? Allow airlines to sell more tickets, allow passengers to buy cheaper tickets and/or allow airlines to get around EU261? Is the idea to give more flexibility to the customer or the airline?

The aim is to make the overall system more flexible (and more commercial for airlines) while still keeping the same level of protection to those passengers who want protection, and not significantly increase costs for airline or passenger

EU261 was necessary to deal with abuse by airlines (particularly by one well known LCC) but the rules it introduced created rigid inefficiencies in the system... the question is how to avoid those inefficiencies while still keeping the structural confidence-creating benefits of EU261

But is the solution you are suggesting legal under 261/2004?

If it were possible - someone would have been doing it for years. Carriers guard their terrirtory with blood hounds. After Covid, I don't see a change in the rules happening.

I think the idea falls down because airlines charge a premium for flexibility. EU261 compensation is only payable with less than 2 weeks notice, so you’re suggesting masking the ticket “stand-by”, or “unconfirmed” inside the 14 day window? So airlines could publish a theoretical schedule, cancel the flight close to departure and not be liable?
It would be interesting to know how many flexible tickets were actually changed, pre-COVID. As there already seems very straightforward ways for passengers to buy cheap, inflexible or less cheap flexible fares.

Cheaper standby tickets (the old definition, not the one used in the US nowadays) disappeared because regular travellers got fairly savvy about which flights were not normally full, and bought standby instead, actually leading to a revenue decrease (if you do this at university, as some of us have done, this is known as "revenue dilution").

Certainly in the UK, you cannot override statutory law (eg EU261) by making any contractual statement. The law is the law. End of.

Oh well, back to the drawing board. Thanks to all for their opinions.... was very pleasantly surprised by the responses on here

Maybe it is all children on this post, but those who might remember the late 70s would recall theperfectly legal transatlantic standby tickets. It was a reaction by the legacy carriers (at the time BA, TWA and Pan Am) to thwart the startup Laker Skytrain. You paid your money and then stood in an overnight queue outside the London town terminal and when these places opened around 0700 you either got confirmed or rejected.
A further development was the famous TWA 'Budget' flight, where you simple choose the outbound and return week, and then the airline allocated you a place on the emptiest flight, a week before hand. Then it was 'use it or lose it'. This one was a nightmare because you could end up going out begining of one week and back at the end of the next, or alternatively it could be out Saturday, back Sunday. The passenger had no control.
I worked in one of these airline's res. office at the time and spent many an hour arguing with passengers who were not happy with their allocated flight. Tough!

Not quite children, because not only do I recall those standby tickets, or actually refer to their commercial downsides in my post just above, but I actually used them on multiple occasions on BA to Los Angeles in 1978-80. It had just changed over from the leased Air New Zealand DC-10 to the new BA 747-200B, plus a daily BA flight had been started at the same time to San Francisco, so there was plenty of capacity to California.

About £200 return. Not only that from London, but from any other BA domestic station as well by connection, so I once got an inclusive sector on the One-Eleven down from Manchester, buying the ticket at the BA counter at Ringway. On another occasion I walked mid-morning into the old BA overseas ground terminal at Victoria, there was a nice display board with the status of all standby destinations that day; all had space except Washington, marked "flight full".

Overnight queues were a feature of the Laker operation, and only on key dates anyway, such as all the US college students returning at the end of the summer.

I then joined a major worldwide corporate, whose UK office was near Heathrow. Headquarters in Detroit, and the MD was from there; there was of course a lot of travel to and fro. The MD had a Daimler plus chauffeur provided, old Reg who had the job for years and had seen many an MD come and go. One day we all got yet another memo about cost-cutting; this one was saying that travel costs to Detroit were to be reduced by using standby from now on, as in "his experience" there's always room. He was an accounting cheapskate, even he went economy. This was of course a significant nuisance as you now had to go to a BA office at 8 am to get the ticket for the afternoon flight.

We had a branch office in Newcastle, and the manager there came down to the London office one day on the first BA domestic. Walking out of Terminal 1, who does he see standing in the ticket counter queue but Reg the chauffeur. "Hello Reg, what are you doing here ?". "Oh, Mr X is going to Detroit this afternoon, so I've just come down for his standby ticket. Hang on a few minutes and I'll give you a lift back to the office ...".

I don't recall those TWA tickets at all, at least not from London.

I've previously bought such a ticket in Sweden. I think it was Next Air that had cheap standby for 25 or younger. You just turned up at the airport and bought a ticket if there was free seats

There used to be Standby tickets in Australia during the 1980s (and probably earlier). I used them a few times. Airlines soon figured out that if you wanted to travel on a particular day, you'll pay... So standby tickets became the preserve of ID90 etc.

Yield management is a bit of a "dark art". I remember getting on a flight ex-Rio that was -57 on an ID90. No issue getting on. Some routes were notorious for no-shows, usually in F and J. If you made LHR-JFK a standby route, I wouldn't fancy my chances if it was overbooked.

It's not a dark art at all to those experienced in it. LHR-JFK on BA would be quite a good chance, because one of the more common reasons (of many) is late arrival of an inbound connecting aircraft (or stuck in transit security etc); on a US carrier less so because they have less connecting passengers at the London end, more at the US end.

And it depends when you look. In the morning you may well be grossly over like this. As people rebook onto earlier flights, or tomorrow, or whatever, the numbers change through the hours. Being 50 over on a widebody is nothing unusual on certain routes.

yes - I can remember being waitlisted at #156 on a KLM 737 AMS-LHR at one time.........................

It used to be that buying last minute was cheap - now it's expensive. Life has changed immeasurably in the last 50 years and the speed of life and the business cycle has mean that people prize being able to change and move quickly. Sometimes you can get a low cost last minute but all carriers found that holiday traffic in particular was not booking early and waiting till close to date and then picking whatever was cheapest. So we don't have much of that any more!

They want your money earning them interest for as long as possible.

There is absolutely nothing from a regulatory perspective to prevent an airline from offering standby seats if it wished. The question has to be "why would you?".

On EU261, the regulation only applies if you have a seat confirmed (Article 3(2)(a)). Up to the point where your seat is confirmed, then you effectively have no rights if you are denied boarding or the flight is disrupted. EU261 (or UK261 if you're now leaving a UK airport!) is not a barrier.

Also on this point, you cannot ask a passenger to exempt themselves from EU261 - for example, in return for a cheaper ticket. Article 15 of the regulation prevents you from doing that - basically if a passenger accepts sub-par [or no] compensation, they can go back later and claim their entitlement. You can't therefore sell cheaper tickets with an opt-out from EU261, even though many consider that would be a worthwhile option - basically to give the consumer the choice.

On the topic of commercial standby fares, they used to exist very widely - British Midland had them across its domestic network. Marvellous they were too. They were about £25 one-way all-in back in the early/mid 90s.

There were two main reasons for these disappearing. The first was the advent of low-cost carriers who made £25 one-way fares pretty common place - you didn't have to take a risk on your travel plans to get one. If you could book in advance and have certainty for £25, most did. The second was the inversion of the yield management principles led by the LCCs - bookings got far more expensive towards the date of departure and the best deals were "reserved" for those booking early. Put another way, if the full fare was £150 and you had a standby fare of £25, for every last-minute passenger who might have been prepared to pay £150 but instead bought a cheapie £25 standby, you have to carry five more passengers to make up for the "opportunity cost" - the lost revenue - from that first one. It never happens, so therefore the standby fares dilute overall last-minute yields.

I can't think you'll see these back any time soon, even though there is no regulatory blocker to prevent it. I just can't see why any airline would put itself to the bother of doing it in today's world. And I'm sure you'd also have to get passengers to sign some disclaimer to say that you'd properly explained the conditions to them at the point of sale, to avoid creating yet another bandwagon onto which the EU261 claims people would no doubt seek to jump. The claims culture has done so much damage to the airline industry - heartily encouraged by that gob***** at Which? - that it is no wonder that relations between airlines and passengers are difficult.

I disagree for the very last point: the claims culture was also fed by the airlines when they were trying to save money when things went wrong. It is rumoured that EU261 was introduced because airlines overbooked and didn't offer sufficient assistance to the pax left behind

Correct. The tipping point was a major LCC running flights just once/twice a week to Mediterranean holiday islands, then doing a operational cancellation on those already on holiday there with subsequent flights sold out, and saying they would either refund the £30 fare or rebook on their "next available flight", which was several weeks away, leaving homeward-bound families stranded on the island. And their chief exec was then (inevitably) rude about them on television.

Errr...not really.

EU261 came about when the late Loyola de Palacio was Transport Commissioner and although it may not be helpful to land "blame", if this sits with any airline then it is Iberia. She had experienced her own problems with disruption including being stranded at Brussels one Friday night but was persuaded to take action after her Chief of Staff was bumped three times in fairly short order from flights. There is a good account of how this came about back in the history of PPrune here which doesn't need any re-telling.

LCCs weren't really into the holiday market back in 2004 in the way that they are now. The prevalence of the likes of Ryanair and easyJet in the holiday market was in its infancy.

I remember flying with a Delta standby air pass in 1984, but in those days load factors outside Friday & Sunday afternoon were around 50%. Very different in those days.