chinatraderjmr

The US Court of Appeals just made this ruling last week (or the week before) and it had NOTHING to do with the RGN tickets. This case has been winding its way thru the courts since way before anyone even bought a tkt to RGN. The DOT issued some very common sense, consumer friendly regulations. There were a number of them but the 2 that I can think of that the airlines REALLY hated were: 1 that the total price (including taxes and fees) must be shown and in a font size that is at least as large as the size the fee's are shown in and 2) the right to return a tkt within 24 hours.
Two different Airline funded groups (lobbiests) brought the suit saying these new regulations would hurt the industry. They keep losing and going to the next court and the next. The airlines clearly want nothing (not even common sense stuff like size of font) to stand in their way of being in control

The courts rules against the airlines for the same reason they would rule WITH them (IMO) if they are brought to court by anyone holding a 4 mile ticket - that is, sometimes common sense is just such a strong factor that you can't win. (how the lawyers for the airlines could keep a straight face when telling a judge that they need to be able to put the total fare in tiny tiny print in order to stay competitive is laughable (and keeps getting laughed out of court. I would imagine the courts would have the same thing to say when someone says "I had no idea 4 miles was a mistake).

Short hair Francis

For anyone interested in the case docket of Spirit Airline Inc. vs. the US Department of Transporation, 11-01219, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
http://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/B3C8FBE2AB1F6A9185257A45004EE709/$file/11-1219-1385164.pdf

apk123

If actual agents who work at united selling tickets for living didn't know it was a mistake, why do you assume that a bunch of random people from the internet all "clearly" knew it was a mistake?

seanthepilot

Having a first class cabin preserves the Business class revenue AND allows the airlines to give a benefit to VIPs (Staff and upgrade certificate recipients in UAs case) moving them to first.

If all you have is Econ and Biz, most of your premium revenue seats are then Staff and Upgraders, with no way to reward or surprise the Paid Business class passenger with the F upgrade.

F cabin has a definite value far exceeding any revenue from paid F tickets.

chinatraderjmr

Very true. Everyone knows UA sells very few full F tkts. No one in their right mind will spend $20K on a UA F tkt when the fare is the same in SQ/CX/EK. (most of the F tkts it does sell are to corp accounts that get huge discounts). If UA wanted to sell more F tkts, it would need to spend a fortune upgrading the soft product, specially train F/A's, etc, etc. however, UA does sell a fair amount of full C tkts which can cost over $10K. One of the reasons UA can find enough customers to buy full C is the upgrade to F that many of them get. If there was no F, many people that buy D,C Fares would just buy P,Z fares

johnathome

I can only speak to the EWR/HKG route which is generally business travelers. Most people are traveling for work so assume firms are paying the bulk of the fare ($6K roughly). Certainly there are folks who are upgrading using $ and points which starts at $350 to $600 or using their GPUs which I view as more than $23.

Lastly, UA and all the airlines need to account for the airline miles and have a value assigned to them as a liability on their balance sheet. Imagine if 4 miles is now able to books F tickets to Asia, their liabilities just ballooned from an accounting standpoint.

eponymous_coward

And yet Delta does just fine without a longhaul F cabin in the American market. As did Continental prior to the UA/CO merger; it was Continental (without an F cabin) that expanded their longhaul service in NYC, and it was United (with an F cabin) who coughed up routes like JFK-NRT/LHR.

Look, this is really, REALLY simple. The USA carriers are in the most ferociously competitive market in the world; there are no flag carriers operating out of megahubs. They'll all run over their grandmothers for cash. They aren't buying quite expensive widebodies, expanding their route networks, and dedicating a bunch of space to business passengers just so they can carry passengers on cheap coach fares and employees in luxurious lie-flat seats. People do buy C fares on DL, AC, NZ, and so on, even if there is not an F cabin to upgrade to. What some airlines have discovered is that instead of giving your customers the expectation that they should get something for nothing (upgrades), they should get what they pay for, and they should adjust their service offering to what they are good at, and what their customers are willing to pay for.

I'm not all that convinced that the return on the investment is worth it. And again- DL doesn't seem to need longhaul F. CO spent a decade expanding their network without longhaul F. 20-30 years ago, every longhaul F hard product that was out there was demonstrably inferior to today's lie-flat C. Do people really have to pay 10x markup on caviar, champagne, whisky and Chateaubriand from what you'd pay on the ground to be in a metal tube for 10-15 hours? Or will a reasonable business class meal, flat screen TV and a bed suffice? I think a lot of airlines are finding out that the answer to that question.

Majikow

Both of these positions are ridiculous.

Shanye2233

I don't think anyone who goes to court would be laughing . Did you get a ticket in this ? You always seem so negative .

SFO777

What do you think?

fragment54

Right.

sbrower

If UAL wants to claim there was a "mistake" they will need to explain: a) how they made the mistake; b) why it was obvious to the customer. The fact that the UAL ticket agent didn't say anything isn't particularly relevant. (I didn't say it can't be relevant - I just said that the state of mind of the reservations agents probably can't be shown and isn't particular significant.)

The individual suing will need to explain (assuming they are going to tell the truth, and not commit perjury) that they did *not* learn about this from an internet posting (because they all make it clear that it was a mistake), and they didn't learn about it from a friend, and they didn't learn about it from any similar source. And they need to be able to explain that even though they had an estimate of what the "normal" price was (having looked at the chart, etc.) that they reasonably believed that they just got lucky and the agent was telling them about a great secret sale. Oh, and if they want to be believable, they better have been calling with an account that had at least 200k in it, because someone with a very low balance MP account woudn't even be calling to try and book a FC award ticket.

andyh64000

Not really...I fly to Asia a lot and if these tickets are honored then my chances for a reasonably priced C fare or being able to use a GPU pretty much goes to zero. No sense in me staying with United if that happens.

bocastephen

I missed the last 50 pages after UA basically said "screw all of you, haha" and the DOT ended up like a deer in the headlights.

So, can anyone provide a simple summary as to where the group is given the teeth gnashing, threats, tears and other emotional outbursts? What is the next step - small claims court, big court, no court?

Mrgolfer21

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworst...illion-lesson/

So, wait...new software made a huge computer glitch and caused them to make trades they then had to cover internally...why can't they just cancel the trades and chalk it up to a programming error, isn't that the way it works in the airline industry?