Published Fares that Make No Sense
 

I recently got a list of published fares for the route Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) / Maputo (ex-Lourenço Marques, Mozambique) from Travelocity (Sabre). It turns out that Iberia, British Airways, Air France, and KLM publish fares for that route. None of these companies actually have flights between South America and Southern Africa. South African Airways, Aerolineas Argentinas, Qantas, and Malaysian do not publish fares for the route, although they do operate flights such as São Paulo / Johannesburg, Buenos Aires / Cape Town, etc. Since I saw the published fares I innocently contacted British Airways and asked for a reservation. The agent I first spoke to knew nothing about the fare, but after a while he got a supervisor on the line who told me that although the Rio / Maputo fare exists, the actual mileage exceeds the allowed limit because the British Airways routing would have to go through London. So my question is … why do airlines publish fares that cannot be used to issue tickets on their own routes? Why bother? And why do the airlines that actually fly similar routes refrain from publishing fares? When I called up South African on the phone they were more than happy to make reservations and sell me a ticket, and at a fare lower than the published ones. Does anyone understand what's going on?

You need to be a travel agent or airline ticketing personnel to understand fares and what logic lies behind it. Most airline reservation agents don't know about it themselves. But published fares are there for a reason and it works.

So there is some logic behind it? That's nice to hear but it surely does escape most of us as you say!

The airlines use constructed fares and publish them, even though they may not sell them. For example, suppose you want to go from New York to Miami. British Airways would publish a fare JFK-LHR-MIA, and would price it as JFK-->LHR and LHR-->MIA although no one would buy this fare, so they wont sell it, as it would cost 3-5 times more than say an AA flight JFK-MIA.