Originally Posted by
matio_svk
It is admirable that you prepared and studied all of this before buying, but what you are describing here is THEORY. Yes, in theory you are right. But what man4 and me are saying is, that reality is sometimes different and of one of these realities is denied boarding (and I am talking about this specific scenario)
There have been past experiences where certain airlines were more hostile and others extremely hostile to FD, that doesn't mean they were 100% un-flyable, but risk was involved and it was best you had a plan B (or refundable hotels
), this is also the case...
Originally Posted by
man4business
Yes, technically you are absolutely right. And some desk agents are, unluckily, trained to pay attention to this part which makes the trick. The rest is very similar to what had been happening earlier in the case of LX. We will see in the next months how it will develop...
It's hard to believe they train desk agents specifically to look for FD, and I highly doubt many even know what FD is and the relation between 1x and fuel surcharges. If they can figure it out, they might as well close the entire trick. Plus their ground agents in C2c are all contracted and don't work for the airline. They only work for them a few hours on days there are flights. Nothing here about denied boarding and troubles makes sense in this scenario, especially with this airline. Most will just do their job and check you in, as long as you have the required travel documents. And the gate agents have much better things to do than to look for FDs. Those who got denied boarding must have raised suspicions and required secondary inspection from a supervisor in one way or another. There are lots of low fare, error fare, etc, and it is not the ground agent's job to inspect the fare you paid.
LX was a different story. They apparently had a programmer in the back office who wrote a script to look for tickets without fuel surcharge and flag them when check-in opens. But again, it was not like some physical agent at the airport had the ability to sift out the FDs among all the people checking in that day. They were just following orders from the back office, or honestly they could have cared less if it was not for the order from upper management.
Until I start hearing the full story of anyone who ran into trouble with this particular C2c-C3 FD, there is still no credible risk to it. It's just as risky as the hundreds of other FDs completed by members here without any problems. In fact, the probability is so low, that you are more likely to run into many other unforeseen problems with the trip than worrying about denied boarding or getting the "special treatment" from the airline.