TravelBuzz! - Independence Air - Contract of Carriage

This is indeed a breath of fresh air in the idiotic world of airline ticket pricing... The following is a quote from the upstarte Independence Air contract of carriage:

"When a roundtrip or multi-segment reservation has been made and the customer fails to claim his or her reservation for the first portion of the trip, Independence Air will not cancel the return or continuing portions of the customer’s reservation. Independence Air does not prohibit or penalize what is commonly known as "back-to-back" or "hidden-city" ticketing."

I surely hope they suceed and force competitors to change their policies as well!!!

Why would that even be necessary in the first place? Low-cost carriers should price each leg seperately to start with, so there's no reason any person should do back-to-back flying at all.

I'm sure they will soon do away with the part about not cancelling return portion of tickets. Although it is not always the case in most cases people who don't take their first trip do not need a return flight. If they kept all of these return reservations a lot of empty seats would be unable to be sold.

If they are serious about this all they have to do is price allow people to buy discounted one way tickets at half the cost of their discounted round trips.

I thought that Independence Air was a point to point airline, so their promise of not penalizing people who purchase hidden city tickets would never come into play.

Something tells me this paragraph in their terms will haunt them like front page statement made by Charles Foster Kane in the movie "Citizen Kane" where he described his "new newspaper".

I don't know which I find more difficult to believe that Atlantic Coast Airline will be a customer orientated airline, or that they will be in business 12 months after they sever their relationship with United. For their employees sake I hope I am wrong, but I have spent too many hours of my life in the F gates at ORD waiting for crews/planes/spare parts/cleaning the plane listening to excuse after excuse as to why the delay is beyond their control, and how they don't know how long the delay will be to believe this will all change when they start their new airline.

Southwest also expressly allows hidden-city and back-to back-ticketing. Southwest offers its lowest fares as one-ways for 50% of the lowest roundtrip price. Independence Air and AirTran sell all of their fares as one-ways for 50% of the round-trip price.

Even though these are point-to-point airlines, they still publish connections compete on price on certain routes, so there is occasionally money to be saved using hidden-city ticketing. For example, IND-MDW-X or DTW-MDW-X might price out cheaper than MDW-X because of matching an ATA sale from IND or a Spirit sale from DTW. But they are much rarer than, say, DAY-CVG-X on DL.

Just to clarify something, Independence Airlines is not a point to point carrier. We have one hub, Dulles, and all flights are into or out of that hub. :cool:

Maybe in a few years as we get more Airbusses (Airbii), we will take a few of the RJ's and start a point to point network, but for now hub and spoke.