dchapm

Hi all,

Just noticing some real oddities when it comes to booking. One of the routes I normally have taken frequently in the past is SEA-OMA with connection through DEN.


Right now if you try to book a SEA-DEN it shows available through April 29th every day. If you try to book a DEN-OMA it shows available through April 29th every day.


BUT, if you put in SEA-OMA it gives the message
"Service between Seattle/Tacoma, WA (SEA) and Omaha, NE (OMA) is discontinued after February 25, 2015."

And the flights are only available Monday and Wednesday starting January through the 25th and unavailable afterwards.


Seeing this, you might think the reason why it won't let me book SEA-OMA is because the connecting flights do not match up. I was thinking the same thing. However looking at F9's schedule for Seattle to Denver flights I see that they normally do two a day: one at 10:17am-1:49pm and another at 7:25pm-10:53pm (I used Thursday March 19th as an example)

On the same date I search for DEN-OMA and find these flights: 7:49am-9:37am and 4:50pm-6:37pm. Doing a connecting flight from the early Seattle flight and the 4:50pm out of Denver is a completely normal itinerary.


So why is the website not allowing me to book this? Does F9 simply not want me to be able to fly from one cold weather destination to another? It's absurd because I could go and book two separate flights and get there, unless they're planning on cancelling some routes and just haven't notified people yet...

myleguy

Pure speculation here, but it may be that the economics of the ULCC business model favor nonstop over connecting flights. So perhaps they think that can sell enough SEA-DEN and DEN-OMA seats with local traffic and gain higher revenue overall than offering a connecting itinerary.

dchapm

Interestingly enough, I found that you can fly Omaha to Seattle on a one-way flight, but not Seattle to Omaha. Even booking a round-trip ticket, it gives you the notification when you try to pick a return date.


I can't imagine this will cause their traffic to increase to Seattle, since they only fly people to Seattle (so they get stuck there? Not a bad place to be stuck, I suppose... )

So for those in Seattle, apparently if you want to fly to certain destinations it will work (Kansas City/MCI worked). I find it very strange, maybe they are not selling the tickets because the fares are too competitive for that route.

To sum up my findings, for Spring 2015 (March-April):

- OMA-SEA: Bookable
- SEA-OMA: Not bookable
- SEA-DEN: Bookable
- DEN-OMA: Bookable
- SEA-MCI: Bookable
- MCI-SEA: Bookable


Oh well, just another reason to use up my FF miles, give up my credit card and stop flying Frontier. It used to be that they either flew someplace or not, with a consistent schedule, now it's very seasonal and they're doing weird things with the routes and whether you're "allowed" to book someplace or not... probably a matter of time before they remove the Seattle flights as well, since it's a cold weather to cold weather flight.

dchapm

Just wanted to follow up with what I learned when I contacted Frontier.

The reason the flights wouldn't show up is that the layover is over 4 hours and according to them, their system will consider it an "invalid connection" if that's the case.


The schedule I had looked at involved arriving in Denver something like 1pm-2pm and leaving on the connecting flight at 8pm. Apparently Frontier's system considers this non-bookable. However they will book it over the phone if you call (and pay the extra fee for doing so, naturally... maybe I could ask them to waive it).

The reason why the return flight (OMA-SEA) of the itinerary was bookable is that it did not have a long connection time - more like 1h30m or 2h.


The confusion on my part was from the message on the website saying "Service is discontinued..." Really all that was happening is the flight schedules were changing to make it more difficult.

It would be nice if they'd let customers override this and choose their own connection. When I search for international flights on other sites, I get many ridiculously-low connection windows (such as 45m or 1h) available for booking, at airports it's very hard to get through in that time, with customs, layers of security, long gate travels, etc.


so it's very weird to me to have an airline say "Oh, you're staying in Denver for 6 hours until your next flight? Naaaah we can't let you do that!" I recall at least United would display connecting flights that were that long.

Oh well, I can't claim it makes sense but it is consistent at least.