Sigh.

[tahnan]

Imagine a game store where you walked in with a game still in plastic wrapping and a receipt and said, "I'm sorry, this isn't actually what I wanted. Can I exchange it?" and they said "Sure, and since what you wanted is the same price, no problem. $100, please."

Now imagine an airline where you call up with an unused ticket and a receipt and say, "I'm sorry, this isn't actually what I wanted. Can I exchange it?" and they said "Sure, and since what you wanted is the same price, no problem. $100, please."

I hate the airlines. I mean I really, really hate the airlines. As a community. Made so much worse by the fact that they're unavoidable for most travel.

Comments

[touchstone.livejournal.com]

While fully in agreement that airlines have lousy business practices, I don't think that change fees are actually an example of one. In principle, they're reasonable. It's no different from the 'non-refundable deposit' you pay when reserving or scheduling some other sorts of services. If you reserve a ticket 3 weeks before a flight, and then exchange it the day before the flight, they run the risk of not finding another buyer for that ticket and having an empty seat on their plane. The closer to takeoff you get, the lower their expected return on the ticket. If you're exchanging for a later flight, it's like exchanging an item with a sell-by date of tomorrow for one with a date sometime next week. The item with more time remaining is more useful to the seller, so they don't value them equally.

Now, that doesn't at all justify their charging a fee for moving to an EARLIER flight. Or, say, exchanging an hour after you made the original reservation.

(What makes ME hate airlines is over-booking. If I'm going to pay ahead of time for a service, and they're going to charge me a fee if /I/ change my plans, they'd better be prepared to deliver the service as agreed. Overbooking is, in my mind, effectively fraud.)

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

they run the risk of not finding another buyer for that ticket and having an empty seat on their plane. The closer to takeoff you get, the lower their expected return on the ticket.

I was gonna say, "Except they've reached the point of deliberately underscheduling flights and overbooking planes so they don't have that problem and inconvienence the user instead of themselves," but I see you came around to mentioning that. I agree about it being fraud. Motherfckers. :P

[cazique.livejournal.com]

As a formerly frequent traveler, I have to defend the practice at least conceptually, largely for the reasons you indicate. A few other comments:

- A shrink-wrapped game isn't the same as a seat on an air flight. A seat on an airline flight is a 100% perishable unit of inventory in a high-fixed-cost business: once a flight goes out with a seat empty, the airline can never get any money for it again - it's gone. No matter what kind of change you're initiating to your confirmed reservation, you've taken their inventory off the market for part of the limited time it can be sold. Arguably, a better comparison for the airline seat in the above example is an unopened shrink-wrapped bar of cheese.

- Most airlines, I believe, give you some grace period, from a couple of hours to a couple of days.

- Whenever you buy an airline ticket, you're making a trade-off - specifically, flexibility for money. You are free to spend more money for the privilege of transfering some or all of the cancellation/change risk from yourself to the airline.

I did a little research on one randomly-chosen flight - specifically, American Airlines flight 1523, leaving LaGuardia for Miami on Tuesday 4/3/07 at 3:59 PM, returning on Friday 4/6 at 1:55 PM on flight 2086. For these flights, the lowest price of a ticket you can currently buy is $268. This ticket is non-refundable and non-changeable and would incur a $100 change fee to change. A "K" class ticket (for those FF geeks among you) costs $598 round-trip, but I believe is refundable without a change fee. Among others, there's also a fare called a "K-up," $748 round trip, that is technically a coach fare, but gets you a first-class seat, with some notable restrictions. A regular first-class seat, fully refundable, costs $2058.

If you change the dates, this is a real-world example. I'm planning a conference for May 1-3 in Fort Lauderdale, of which I'm also a participant. However, my wife is due to give birth on April 25th, so it's unclear whether I'll be able to go. Should I buy the cheapest fare now, knowing that if I don't get to use it I'll wipe out 1/3 to 1/2 with the change fee? Should I buy a refundable ticket now, given that I won't know till probably within a week beforehand whether I'll be able to make it, and I'll want to be able to exchange it with no $ loss to the company? (Haven't decided this yet, incidentally)

-- to be continued --

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

But playing $330 dollars for flexability seems somewhat exorbitant. As does a $100 fee for a $50 ticket; restocking is a point, but if the ticket itself is only $50, what's the justification for charging me $100 if I change it (as opposed to, I don't know, 10% of the cost of the ticket)?

[cazique.livejournal.com]

For everything involving numbers, I'm going to lump that under "capitalism," with a lateral reference to "big fat pain in the ass." If people are willing to pay it, then...

Also - you wouldn't change a $50 ticket with a $100 change fee, of course, you'd just buy another one. That's another key point that I didn't mention - the price of air travel, these days, is extremely low. I know it might not seem that way, but if you compare prices 30, 20 or (I believe) even 10 years ago, in real, inflation-adjusted dollars the price has gone way down. I know you don't give a crap when you can't find a ticket from PHL to anywhere for under $350, but prices have gone significantly down.

[cazique.livejournal.com]

-- continued --

- If you had bought your game from an online or otherwise warehouse-based retailer (which is more comparable to an airline), it would be commonplace for you to expect to pay a "restocking fee" to countervail the fact that the same piece of inventory now needs to be sold multiple times - incurring additional costs for infrastructure, processing, people, etc.

- Overbooking - if you have a confirmed seat, there are rules about what the airline is required to do for you. If a flight's oversold, they generally solicit volunteers for going on a later flight - sometimes in a higher class of service, with no price change - and often with additional monetary and other rewards for those volunteers. Changes and unforeseen cancellations are a fact of life for air travel, and airlines have a whole stable of analysts - a department often called something like Yield Management or Revenue Management - that's responsible for figuring out exactly by how much they should oversell every single flight on every single day, complicated by factors like how many seats should be reserved for mileage awards and when to add/subtract them, how much they can expect to shell out in the case of overselling, when people usually cancel, etc.

If there were no overbooking allowed, what would happen? Airlines would have a much more difficult time filling flights, which means they would have an even harder time making money (see "high-fixed-cost business" above). What would that mean? Higher fares! A good example of this is full-fare first class seats. American Airlines, for one, will not (I believe) oversell full-fare first class. In other words, if there are 16 seats in first on a flight, and 16 people have confirmed, they won't sell a 17th. They run the risk of a last-minute cancellation (particularly since full-fare First is refundable), but they've decided that for such an expensive product (bought by valuable - read: high-revenue - customers), it's worth incurring that risk.

OK, seminar over.

All this said - you'll get no argument from me that change fees are a big fat pain in the ass. I just don't think they're unwarranted, and certainly not unfair.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

The fact that the flight I took tonight (the first half of the ticket I have to abandon the second half of) was (a) overbooked and (b) delayed by an hour makes me have that much less sympathy for their inability to re-sell the seat.

I kind of wish I were in town on the 5th, which is the day my ticket's for; it would be worth the hassle of security just to show up at the airport and volunteer to be bumped to the next flight (and then take the free ticket offer and walk off before the next flight).

It's also the fact that it's $100. For a $50 ticket. Which is to say: I can either change my current reservation, by paying $100 plus the $50 difference in cost; or I can just throw away the ticket and buy a new one for $100. If I do the latter, of course, then they have no chance of finding a buyer for the seat I'm giving up, because they don't know that I'm giving it up. (Except of course insofar as they can overbook it.)

[in-parentheses.livejournal.com]

Word. I, too, despise airlines. I've rediscovered buses, for just about any trip where I can get on in the evening and arrive by the next morning. You just show up and hand them money and get on the bus, and if you need to switch anything around about your ticket, it's fine. It costs what it costs, which is a hell of a lot cheaper than flying. There's a seat right there. They don't make you throw out your shampoo and toothpaste first if it's not the right size. Sure, it's slower, but with infinitely less aggravation (and much lower environmental cost! You knew I'd get around to that eventually...). Worth a try, maybe.

[jenaflynn.livejournal.com]

I loathe them. Thanks to cost-cutting, you're pretty much totally screwed as a customer, unless you're traveling on a corporate account.

[lapak.livejournal.com]

I don't know why it doesn't work, but no part of the airline system works - for us or for the airlines - except the actual 'getting there' part.

It seems like half the airlines, at any given point in the last few years, are either going into bankruptcy, coming out of it, or being taken over by someone else. That would SEEM to be a sign that they're not charging enough for their services as an industry. At the same time, rather than just raising prices, they're trying to cut the gap by overselling flights, snatching whatever money they can in change fees, and running their crews ragged.

Something is funamentally broken here, and I'm not sure that we can blame any given airline over it. They've competed themselves into a spiral of self-destruction.