Booking the cheap seats: A process of repeated punishment
 

Why, why, why must I always play frustrating guessing games when trying to book airlines' sale fares? Here's what happens: The airline adverties a sale. The sale has a date range. I want to book a trip within that date range. I click on the "Book Now" link, and am dumped in a regular reservation page, which requires me to guess two dates - one outbound and one return - on which the capacity-controlled sale fare is available, if it's available at all. If I'm lucky, the "Book Now" link has a promotion code embedded in a query string somewhere, so that when I guess the dates wrong the system will at least say "Nope, not that one" as it presents me a higher fare. Back I go to guess again - perhaps if I make the return two days later there will be seats available? No, that didn't work either. Maybe I can try a Tuesday departure and a Thursday morning return, to a different airport that is a co-terminal for my point of departure, providing in the intervening period my local grocery store receives at least two shipments of orange marmalade? Nope, no seats then, either. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/mad.gif

Here I am actively trying to purchase an airline's product, and I am being punished repeatedly, as the airline deliberately makes it difficult for me to give them my money. Why, oh why, can't the airline just show me some dates when the sale is available? The only guess I can make is the airlines hope some people will spend hours being frustrated trying to buy a sale fare, then due to the time they have invested give up and buy a higher, regular fare instead. Psychologists call this phenomenon "escalation of commitment". Consumer groups call it "bait and switch". You pick. At the very least, making it hard for consumers to buy your product is bad business.

The traditional reservation interface - cities, dates, and number of pax, please - does not work well for buying sale fares because it models the user's task poorly. When I'm shopping for cheap seats, I'm not searching primarily by city or date. My primary search criterion is fare basis; this consitutes a search the airlines don't want to support. My secondary search criteria are length of stay and departure date, in that order, and both of those are not fixed values but ranges (and fuzzy ones at that). Apparently searching this way would befuddle the airlines' computer systems. The reservation interface needs another option for travel dates: "Whenever the heck I can get seats!"

Let's extend the notorious "if airlines sold paint" analogy to see what would happen in a normal business:
Customer: "Do you have any 'Sam's Budget Paint?'"
Retailer: "No, we're all out of 'Sam's Budget Paint.' But we're expecting larger-than-usual shipments of 'Sam's Budget Paint' from February 18th to March 3rd. I suggest you pre-purchase your paint now, as it tends to sell out quickly."
Customer: "That sounds good. I'd like to pre-purchase one gallon of 'Sam's Budget Paint.'"
Retailer: "Please specify a date when you would like to come in and receive your paint."
Customer: "February 22nd."
Retailer: "I'm sorry. All the 'Sam's Budget Paint' that's due to come in that day has already been pre-purchased by other customers. Please specify another date."
Customer: "February 23rd."
Retailer: "I'm sorry. All the 'Sam's Budget Paint' that's due to come in that day has already been pre-purchased by other customers. Please specify another date."
Customer: "Well, I'll just take whatever date is available."
Retailer: "We're not set up to work that way. You need to specify a date, otherwise I can't check paint availability."
Customer: "Really, it doesn't matter. Whenever you'll have the paint available for me to take home, that's fine by me."
Retailer: "An error has occurred. The date you specified is not valid. Please go back and correct the error, then try again."

Come on, travel industry - you can do better than that. Some travel sites have improved upon the situation by offering calendar-based shopping applications that can check several days at once, but these still devolve to guessing games most of the time. Please, give us an interface that works!

Finally, credit where credit is due... Kudos to Delta for making it easy to book sale fares. Delta's Web site is subject to the same problems I've described above, but the airline at least allocates enough sale inventory to go around (usually). It's uncommon for me not to be able to get a Delta sale fare to price on the first or second try.

Edited to add the original purpose for this (admittedly long) post:
It's frustratingly difficult to book mileage runs - actually, any sort of travel in which "price elasticity of demand" comes into play - on most airlines!

[This message has been edited by Factotum (edited 01-10-2003).]

I've found that when I'm flexible, Travelocity's "my dates are flexible" option works well for this situation. It puts up a calendar with the dates offered for the fare, and it makes it easy to see when it is and isn't available. It's not flawless, but it's a relatively easy enough interface to use for the situation you describe.

factotum:

Right on !!! can't agree more !!

[This message has been edited by bellwilliam (edited 01-10-2003).]

There's no reason that airlines would want to offer you the dates when the cheapest fares are available.

Air fares are very price discriminatory, with all kinds of fare basis, booking codes, etc. For example, if United has a particular low fare in T class, they would very much rather sell you a T fare outbound, combined with a more expensive W fare inbound instead of a T fare bothways.

With that said, as mentioned, Travelocity's fare calendar does work well. Expedia's own fare calendar is decent for domestic US itineraries.

Alternatively, you can do what a travel agent does. Pull up an availability checker, find out what booking code your particular fare is booked in, and query the dates/flights to see if your booking class is available on all segments. If it is and your itinerary meets all of the other requirements of that fare, it should price out correctly at the sale fare.

This is the method I usually use to determine which flights to further narrow on, and works well since it allow a wider net to be casted initially before narrowing the travel dates. As channa mentioned, it is not perfect, as often the special sale fares do not get included, case in point UA's recent sale fare to Asia.

I think travelocity has the best interface to check for published fares. if you select the months you want to travel and the airlines you are interested in it will show you the cheapest fares and the fare rules are available for reading as well.

When you select a certain fare you are interested in travelocity will show you the days that the fare is offered on and often will show you days as well that there are seats available (in green).

It's very easy to find the days you want. You can then go to your regular airline site to save the $5 booking fee and to get the bonus miles for booking the ticket.

If my preferred airlines would offer the same system I would be ecstatic!

Travelocity is better than most, but even it's color-coded calendar scheme dishes out a lot of frustration. How many times have you clicked on a blue coded date (a/k/a an allegedly available date at the fare selected) only to see it subsequently disappear, often along with the other blue coded dates of the same week?

For what it's worth, I find BA's website the most helpful. Input your dates and voila, fares for the seven adjacent days are displayed. Too bad I rarely fly BA. . .

I agree with the earlier comments -- the airlines like to advertise noteworthy sale fares, but then make them difficult to find and heavily restrict capacity in a bait-and-switch approach. To be fair, it's understandable that they make every effort to maximize revenue. Unless and until our patience wears out, we can't expect much more.

[This message has been edited by cAAl (edited 01-11-2003).]

[This message has been edited by cAAl (edited 01-11-2003).]

Green is available. Blue is just maybe.

That's true, but a vast majority of time I am looking at a sea of blue. Of course, that sea fades into the "don't pass go, don't collect $200" gray all too frequently. Worse yet, you generally lose one week at a time until months on the Travelocity calendar and minutes of your valuable time have gone by the wayside.

Why have a "maybe" color at all? Either there's an avaible itinerary-fare combination for that day or not (even if it's only one flight or set of connecting flights).

Not to rag on Travelocity too much -- it has a lot of great attributes -- but at the same time, it also is no panacea.

Here's my slightly different, but related, gripe:

I often want to find the cheapest upgradable fare (using miles). At least on the airlines I fly (DL and AA), the web site doesn't support this. If I just put in my flight info, it will serve up the cheapest coach fare for that particular set of parameters... which will inevitably be nonupgradable.

On the DL site, I can click the "unrestricted" box, but that will just bring up every option for a refundable coach fare, regardless of price. I understand elites can also choose to search by fares they can upgrade with their 800 (soon to be 500) mile upgrade coupons, but since I'm not elite on DL I don't have that option.

On the AA site, I can choose to search by "fare" (same problem - only gives cheapest restricted fares that can't be upgraded) or "schedule," which is a total crapshoot as far as the fare rules it will produce.

All very frustrating. While Travelocity is a great tool for finding the cheapest fares between two points, it has the same problem of not allowing a search by fare class.

While we're at it, I would LOVE to find a tool that lets me locate the cheapest Business Class or First Class fares between two cities.

Am I missing something? Asking too much?

In addition to the methods described above, have you tried just reading the fare rules? They're usually just a click away from wherever it is you're reading about the sale fare. I know it's not the most user-friendly way, but if trial-and-error is frustrating you, it might be worth a shot, right?

Delta does support this for Medallion upgrades. If you have status you get a checkbox for upgradable fares.

Yes, I mentioned this in my post and also mentioned I'm not Medallion.

Some of you might enjoy looking at my earlier post re: My Christmas Wish.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum35/HTML/004799.html

In order to prevent the huge flood of email about how I got it to come up - it isn't real. It's just an "artist's conception" of what I would like to see.

-alan in seattle

The way I see it here is it is the same as a supermarket and their shelves.
In a prominent place like on the windows outside are put huge signs that something is a bargain inside. Inside on the shelves are placed other items that are not bargains in easy to see, easy to reach spots.
The bargains are placed in a spot where one has to move their eyes either up or down. The fact is that some folks just will not do that. In fact manufacturers of products are willing to pay a supermarket extra money to have their products placed in this lazy spot where one does not have to move their eyes to spot the product or even worse have to bend down to reach the product.
Yes it would be nice to go into the market and have all the sale products jump right into the basket but it isn't going to happen in any mercantile environment that I know of.
If ones minutes are so precious then my suggestion is not to shop for bargains but just take the easy way out and reach for that item that you can see without moving your eyes up or down and only having to reach across. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/rolleyes.gif