Quail

Agreed. That's my point - all this talk about OTA vs airline tickets seems to be a red herring. LA would have been quick to blame OTAs if it could have done so.

palmanfr

Did anybody checked on June 15th what the LATAM website charged for the same tickets ? That is a honest question from my side, as I only checked the IB website and some OTAs mentioned before. I did not check the LATAM website because I wanted to mostly fly with IB due to tier point credit. I doubt that the OTA was charging 1/3rd of the price as suggested. I believe that they charged the base fare indicated on the GDS + Applicable taxes and fees (21.10+25.00+0.70+3.40 USD or equivalent in EUR), and that the same pricing would have been quoted IMHO on LATAM website (since they issue only LA-tickets). Iberia website only sells IB-issued tickets and therefore priced those flights as base fare of 318 USD (for MAD-SCL) + 21.10 + 25.00 + 0.70 + 3.40 + 600-ish of their own YQ resulting in a price around 950.

PbodyPhoto

It is not the consumers responsibility to know the usual cost of a route or the costs of doing business. Sure you may live in Europe and know that Ryanair sells fares for $7 but I live in New York and I don’t know their fare structure or business costs. All I know is that the flight I wanted was $35 direct from the airline and $7 from an OTA.

I need to buy a new ice tray for my fridge. Direct from sub-zero it’s a $350 part. Several retailers have it for $175 and one outlier has it for $65. All genuine new parts. Is it my responsibility to question the $65 price or should I do what every consumer would do and buy it expecting that the business set the price they wanted to set?

bimbonello

You can buy it, and if the seller realizes it's set incorrectly they won't ship it to you and correct it (sounds familiar?). Or they might take the loss and ship it, to keep you happy. But if there are another 3000 sales like this, would they take the loss and keep everyone happy (except them as they'd be bankrupt)?

PbodyPhoto

If they don’t ship the product I would know the next day. Latam and Iberia are over a week in without a single piece of official communication. If they emailed the next day I may say fair call but it has been over a week!

Also 3000 tickets is a drop in the bucket for airlines. If 6000 discounted seats (3k in each direction) could send them bankrupt then they were already too close to failure anyway.

palmanfr

I was just looking at the computer from which I did one the bookings last week. Funny to see the cache page from Expert Flyer showing the fare, and a bunch of iberia, priceline and google flight tabs (received an alert of price drop, that's after that I decided to look at flyertalk and book). Just took a bunch of screenshots "just in case". I can also confirm that very legit OTAs, such as Amex travel were showing those promotional fares but on IB stock only, so 900 Euros RT all included, that's how I decided to look at priceline and such... Wonder if anybody here saw the prices (and took screenshots) on the LATAM website back then.

Sykes

You just described the entire airline industry. Net margins industry-wide are about 5%, which ends up being approximately $20 per passenger. A single mis-priced ticket wipes out the net margin for an entire flight (and that's on healthy airlines, not ones on the brink of bankruptcy). I'm not personally going to shed any tears for them (heck, I'm trying to take advantage of good deals myself), but the amount I'm always amazed how people try to justify taking things way too far.

palmanfr

Agree.
I read about this 3000 number before on this thread, not sure if this number is real or not, but if it is and if we spread this number across the next 330 days (I agree some days there will be more tickets issued than others), it means that an average of 9.1 passengers would fly at this fare daily, via the different Latin America gateways (direct to SCL, but also via EZE, LIM, GRU, GIG, MVD etc...). So that would barely be 1 passenger per flight overall at this fare (SCL-MAD has two flights daily at least, maybe more for LIM and GRU, while EZE and MVD have one daily...). Each aircraft has on average 30 to 36 business class seats from what I saw. Now it's unclear how many tickets were sold at 900 euros and how many were sold at 350 euros, but it is not uncommon that those flights depart with some empty seats upfront (at least that was the situation everytime I flew between SCL and Europe). What would be in your opinion the "breakeven fare" where it's better to keep a seat empty than to fill this empty seat with a cheap fare ? I am genuinely wondering...

Deckter

Just spoke to Booking.com/GTG, and some of their cs are truly useless. Anyway, got transferred to someone a bit brighter and he confirmed that LA cancelled the booking and made notes that only a refund is possible, no rebooking. Obviously, no communication from the OTA, I actually had to ask the guy to put this info in writing. I still have to call back and ask for a refund, it doesn't happen automatically.

Happy that I booked on IB stock as well, at least that one is intact, so I reckon it will stick.

pmarrsouth

The LATAM app has an interesting take when I check my reservation on it:

”You’ve already requested the refund of this trip. See details”

This is blatantly false as I have never requested such a thing

bimbonello

I'm sure if you did some research you'd find out - this shouldn't be an opinion, but a fact. My limited knowledge suggests it not $300 in biz seat. Take off the airport and government charges, (that's about $50 based on the screenshots above), weight/fuel cost (say 4 litres per 100km = 840 litres, IATA says $0.9/litre = $756), catering... wait, do I need to continue?

Check the IATA WATS, last year, Latin America airlines had the lowest margins, -32.6% (yes, negative) and highest losses per passenger at $89.4. So I guess to breakeven won't be easy...

dvs7310

Still purely speculation now, but I suspect that most of you booking the ~$1,000 fare on IB, ticketed by IB (075) will fly.

Both airlines had the flash sale fare in the GDS on a full J fare, but only LA wasn't charging YQ on their tickets (045) booked via a dozen or so agencies. I quite specifically saw the same base fare with an IB code in Expertflyer, though I'm not sure if they have a JV or similar on the route that causes both airlines to publish the same fare in lockstep. There was no way (that I could find) to get it IB ticketed (075) without the YQ... but the base J fare itself was identical for both IB and LA. That I feel is going to be the distinguishing difference. Even in the early part of the 045 LA tickets, LA quicky cancelled their segments but IB didn't and seemingly wasn't going to, hence LA deciding to invalidate the tickets entirely. The reluctance to honor appears to be LA, but not IB.

For me, I'm far enough away that a $1,000 fare on the route wasn't really attractive enough to attempt it, though is still a very great deal in general since it was full J and credits quite well to certain mileage programs. There are ~$1,000-1,500 fares almost constantly between SE Asia and Europe that are just as productive mileage wise and easier/cheaper to position for. Sadly we almost NEVER get any ex-Japan. You might even think that all airlines do higher level of QC before publishing fares ex-Japan since we literally almost never ever see an error fare, let alone even a decent (Under $2k) sale price to anywhere outside of SE Asia.

patvd

I do appreciate you trying to find a way to push the airline to honour your ticket, but let’s be honest: everyone on here knows that 350€ for a full flexible J ticket between Spain and South America can’t be correct and its exactly this question a judge will need to answer.
The consumer organisation, I consulted, is Test Achat from Belgium, they are quite good and even won a couple of EU 261 cases against Ryanair, .
I have bookings both with Iberia and an OTA. Hoping for the Iberia to survive, but that was clearly an error as well, the way out was 475 bizz flexible and 2k-ish in bizz optima which doesn’t allow changes or refund.

patvd

Correct, but if the business later claims they made a mistake and the price should have been 265 iso 65, that sale can be invalidated, without any compensation, under European law. The one thing the seller needs to do is correct the price as soon as possible and refund the customer.

Keter

For those who has tickets with Brazil stopovers who can advise the right way to complain please? The link below is for complaints, one can select Aviation Agency as a body to complain but what is next? It only allows to select Brazil as a place of an 'incident'. Should we just say Rio and explain the story?


https://www.gov.br/anac/pt-br/canais...ale-com-a-anac