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

[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.