MilesBuzz! - Airline Passenger Fair Treatment Act

AN AIRFARE LOOPHOLE THAT CAN COST YOU MONEY

Imagine you bought a train ticket to travel from New York to Miami,
but hopped off in Jacksonville instead. Now imagine when you showed
up for your return trip you were told that simply because you'd gotten
off early, your return ticket was no longer valid and you weren't even
entitled to a refund.

Sounds farfetched and possibly illegal, right? Yet that's exactly how
airlines operate.

To protect their profits, airlines have strict rules preventing this
so-called "hidden city" strategy, in which a passenger buys a
low-priced excursion routing to a farther destination but deplanes
instead at a more expensive stopover city on the itinerary. Similar
strategies, like throwaway ticketing (using a round-trip excursion
fare for one-way travel) and back-to-back ticketing (buying two
low-fare round-trip excursion tickets and then using only one leg of
each), are also forbidden.

A bill currently in congress would guarantee passengers the right to
fly or not fly any portion of a paid itinerary. But for now, the
airlines can legally cancel the remainder of an offender's itinerary
and confiscate his or her tickets, charge the difference between a
purchased ticket and the route actually traveled, and cancel dividend
miles earned with the offending ticket.

So when you purchase an itinerary, be prepared to go the distance --
or else.

To read the text of the Airline Passenger Fair Treatment Act, click on
http://tips.etravels.net/cgi-bin9/flo?y=eFwA0BjJT70B1603nNz

click through "Bill Summary & Status," and enter the bill's name in
the "Word/Phrase" search line.

This proposed legislation, as described, is a bad idea. It constitutes attempts to have the government tell a business how to run, in an area which is outside of legitimate government interest (IMO).

Let's say that Airline #1 has a special from LA to New York, for $199, with a connection in Salina, Kansas.

Airline #2 flies LA to New York, with a connection in Chicago. Normal fare is $699 for New York and $499 for Chicago. Airline #2, not wanting to lose all of its LA to New York business, decides to charge $199 for LA to New York. But they still want to charge $499 to go from LA to Chicago. Under the proposed legislation, everyone can go LA to Chicago for $199.

This doesn't hurt Airline #1 because not many people want to go to Salina, Kansas (no offense to those who do). So Airline #2 is at a serious disadvantage.

No, what it means is that no one can fly from LA to Chicago for $199. Airlines will not have sale fares to destinations that are lower than fares to destinations that are much closer.

I think this is a good idea. It forces some reasonableness in fares. Airlines will still be competitive. They will have to be competitive in other ways, such as a fare sale to all destinations, or reasonable fares to the hub, or with better service.


[This message has been edited by JS (edited 03-20-2001).]

The only true result of this government regulation will be higher fares everywhere. Airlines will pass on the added cost of figuring out dynamic loads on their airplanes to everyone.

If someone on this board figures out a routing that is really cheap and we all take advantage of it and get off at the hub city rather than the destination and the airline flies an empty plane on to the next city that will be the end of cheap fares.

The problem here is that Congress will move on after having made their citizens temporarliy happy while the airlines will focus for however long it takes to tweak their business models to achieve maximum profit under the new rules. Since Congress is not infalliable, a loophole may exist in their regulations that turns the whole advantage to the airlines.

Governments seem to rarely solve the problems they go after in the manner of the giant snow shovel trying to kill a fly.

Let's demand better service directly from the source rather than getting our big brother to fight for us.

My 2.2 cents (the current cost of one AA mile)

JS: The problem is that you are making assumptions about what is "better" rather than letting the person risking a few billion dollars (a major airline) make that decision.

Let me try this. What if the sale is from LA to Chicago for $199, while LA to New York is $499. Airline #1 flies LA to Chicago. Airline #2 flies LA to Chicago VIA New York. Now, everyone can fly to New York (which is farther) for only $199.

LA-NYC-CHI is a longer distance travelled than LA-NYC.

If illogical pricing should be allowed, why do we have anti-dumping laws?

LA-NYC-CHI IS longer which is the point. Both airlines are trying to sell the Chicago destination for $199 while the airline that connects through NYC sells LA-NYC for $499.

With the new rules, you could hop off at NYC for $199 and they fly a potentially empty seat on to Chicago after figuring the extra fuel needed to fly you, the catering needed to feed you, and all the little accounting things we (and the government) know nothing about.

We will not win with this new set of rules.

drewman

Sometimes government intervention is good in order to ensure the fairness of doing business as well as protecting consumers.

I am from California, where now a great deal of people are questioning the "deregulation" of the utility industry. For awhile, the government did not want to get involved, but now many see that at times of major distress, the government must step in to secure economic stability.

With that in mind, I disagree with sbrower, who suggested that government has no business in business.

My remarks were meant in a general sense. There are times and places where government regulation is appropriate. Usually, in my view, it doesn't work when government tries to set pricing.

Unfortunately, the power crisis in California (where I also live) is an example of that principle. The problem is that government has *not* really deregulated electrical power. There is a cap on how much they can charge consumers. The cap is for less than the current cost of electricity. As a result, the power companies (the intermediaries who buy power from the producers and sell it to the consumers) are paying more for their product than they are allowed to charge their customers. So, they are facing bankruptcy. The state, unwilling to accept the political heat for allowing free market pricing, is now coming up with billions of dollars to buy the power.

I don't mean to get lost discussing economics, an area in which I am *not* an expert. My original response (at the top of the thread) was meant to raise the issues inherent in any attempt for government to set pricing by private enterprise.

I don't think the government should be focusing on *this* aspect of airline service. The percentage of the traveling public that uses hidden-city or back-to-back tickets is very, very small.

I'd rather have gov't focus on safety, air traffic control, and providing consumer protections for when the airlines cancel/delay flights.

I would imagine that the discounts airlines offer to large companies would have to decrease under the new legislation. The reason: repeating business travelers stand to gain the most from back-to-back tickets. If this is the case, I doubt that the large companies would support the bill - they'd rather pay for occasional one-way tickets than have to rework all of their negotiated discounts with each airline.

There are so many other concerns about air travel then worrying about these fares. The only solution will be they will all go away, and the price on these routes will probably go up significantly.

Yes, I use them from time to time (though rarely if ever anymore), but if this happens they won't be around for anybody to use, the airlines won't just give in and let everybody fly for the lower cost, they will eliminate them completly.