airline tickets

[ghlinger]

Curiosity question. Has anyone received a refund when the price of their air ticket went down? I checked and Delta's price went down about $90. They want a fee of $100 to reissue the ticket. Wondering what others have found about other airlines. Sure will influence me in the future.

[bUU]

That is standard practice for heavily-discounted airfares on traditional airlines. The offer of deeply discounted rates is accompanied with a requirement that you agree to pay a penalty for any changes. The amount of the penalty varies depending on the fare code. I recently incurred a 100% penalty for some $39 each-way tickets Boston to Philadelphia. I will probably incur a 50% penalty on some tickets I have planned to use in January, but couldn't get insurance for so bought back-up tickets as insurance which turn out to be better flights. It is unfortunate, but it is far better than paying full fare.

[ghlinger]

bicker I agree with you that it's better then paying full fare. However, they claim they need to reissue the ticket. My contention is there is no change except the price. Could agree with a reasonable penalty. Ticket went from ~$350 to $260. That's $180 for the 2 of us. Also agree that the refundable fare would have been ~$900 more for each. This is something I'll keep in mind next time I need tickets. I was curious what others might have experienced. BTW still pretty cheap to fly accross the country.

[bUU]

"No change except..." So there is a change. A change in price is surely something that the airline wants to assess a penalty for. And indeed the better the original deal, the higher the penalty will surely be.

[ghlinger]

FYI on our cruise thread I'm told Southwestern issues a credit to be used on future tickets. This makes sense. I'd even agree with a small charge.

[bUU]

Yup, I believe in additional to Southwest, some of the other discount carriers have lower penalties for changes than the traditional airlines. JetBlue's penalties are about $20-$25. AirTran's penalties are around $50.

[ghlinger]

Well if the difference goes above $100 I'll get those SOB's. Also will keep in mind next time I get tickets. To there credit, we've got exit row seats on all the flights.

[Globaliser]

FYI on our cruise thread I'm told Southwestern issues a credit to be used on future tickets. This makes sense. I'd even agree with a small charge.

I can't for a moment see why any of this makes sense. When you bought the ticket, you must have been content with the price you paid. Why should you also get a guarantee that nobody else will ever pay a lower fare than you?

 

Look at it another way: If you bought concert tickets, and then a week before the concert the venue or the promoter decided to shift a large amount of unsold tickets by having a 50% off sale, would you expect to get half of your ticket price back?

 

Sometimes the only thing that makes sense is the connection between practices like this and the fees currently being made by airline bankruptcy lawyers.

[ghlinger]

Globaliser Few years back I got a refund when the concert tickets price went down. Have to agree about lawyers. Better argument is price doesn't increase if ticket price increases.

[kitty9]

No one understands airline pricing structures. You can call at 1pm, get a fare and call back at 1:03 and get a different fare. No matter how you argue it, when it comes to airlines, there's no one particular fare. You might have paid $200 and the guy in the seat next to you paid $150, for absolutely no reason. And no, airlines are under no obligation to give you a refund if they decide to lower their prices on a certain number of seats on your flight. That's why they instituted the change fee concept, to stop passengers from trying to get rebates on fare reduction. It's the same with how they handle their so-called sale prices. You call for the sale price, and they tell you that it's only for a very few seats, and they've already been taken. They then sell you a seat for a much higher rate.

[Globaliser]

No one understands airline pricing structures. You can call at 1pm, get a fare and call back at 1:03 and get a different fare. No matter how you argue it, when it comes to airlines, there's no one particular fare. You might have paid $200 and the guy in the seat next to you paid $150, for absolutely no reason.

Actually, for very good reasons - airlines have probably developed the most sophisticated structures on earth for charging what a specific portion of the market will bear at that particular point in time. Deregulation has commoditised air travel.

 

The structures used by the airlines are basically the same structures as mean that sugar sells on the commodity markets for $x per ton this week, and $y per ton next week. Only the airlines are also trying to sell cheap tickets to leisure travellers who can't pay much more - and simultaneously trying to get business travellers who can pay much more to buy very expensive tickets, even though they would naturally prefer to pay less. The ways they have devised of getting the latter market to pony up the extra money are very clever.

 

If every seat on a plane were the same price, air travel would become unaffordable for a large proportion of the current travelling public.

[MandyGirl]

Southwest charges no penalty or "reissue" charge. The Customer only pays if there is a fare difference. The Contract of Carriage is available here. When booking online, you can see the fares offered for each specific flight and if that fare is still available. And... as long as there is a seat available for sale, you can use your Rapid Rewards credits. :) I still have about 100k miles on AA sitting in 'the bank' because the times/flights I've wanted to use them for may have only two seats available as frequent flyer seats that have already been reserved (and I normally start looking well in advance). Don't have that challenge on Southwest.