Individual exercises now listed in first post for ease of finding:



So just how much is the "free changes" feature of your average Latitude ticket worth? If I had to guess, all I could really say is that it is worth a negative amount of money. That is, free changes is a profoundly stupid reason to purchase a Latitude fare.

And to demonstrate just how stupid it really is, let's all play a game, cost free, to see just how much purchasing a Latitude fare saves you (or more likely costs you) when it comes to changing a ticket. The rules are easy:

1. Within this thread, anyone can start a game - all you need do is list a sequential game #, and pick a city to which Air Canada flies (and put that info in a post in this thread, of course)
2. Someone else picks a different city to which Air Canada flies
3. A third (different) person picks a date in the future, any date from "next day" to "next year"
4. A fourth person picks another, different date (it could be the same date, but that might make it difficult, so for the sake of "easiness" for now the rule will be the two dates must be different)
5. A fifth different person does two things - the first is decide which city is the origin and which is the destination. (Outbound and return dates will of course simply be decided by the order of the dates.) Then they price out the itinerary on aircanada.com, in both T+ and Latitude (both ways) and post the results (routing, flight numbers and times, Latitude fare, Tango+ fare) in a thread.

6. Here's where the fun begins -- any number of different or even the same people can, at anytime, decide to make a change. For the sake of simplicity (at least for now) you have to start with the same origin and destination, and the you can only change flight dates by 1 day -- that is you can change to a different flight or flights on the same day, the previous day or the next day. You can select a different routing if you like, as someone might do if R space opened up on a different routing (LHR-YVR shows R0, but LHR-YEG-YVR suddently shows R2 R4, for example.)

At this point, you post the new itineary and both the new Latitude fare and Tango+ fare. You'll also have to do a little bit of math, to figure out the added cost for the $56 (including 12%HST) change fee and the fare difference due to any increase in the T+ fare. Post the additional costs due to the schedule/itinerary change, and remember to include the exercise number.

That's it. Anyone can enter a single parameter for the exercise, or even start a new exercise if they so desire. (Just try to keep the exercise numbers in some sort of order, and more importantly, unique.)

Once the 5 basic parameters are posted (city 1, city 2, date 1, date 2, and origin/destination) anyone else (including those who chose the basic parameters) can, at anytime, demonstrate just what the cost and/or consequence of a change would be at that moment.

(And once we get good at this, maybe we'll open it up to same day return, and date changes beyond a single day. Perhaps we'll also be able to cascade multiple changes and add up the accumulating change fees. But to get started for now we'll just keep it simple.)


Free. Fun. Easy. Informative. And anyone can play.



I'll even start... this will be Exercise #1 - for no other reason than that I live here (and of course the fact that it is the greatest city in the world) the first city is YVR- Vancouver. Others can now choose the other details.

Ready! Fire! Aim!