Here’s an Ask Cranky question from a time long ago. Bereavement fares. Everyone knows about them, but are they any good?

I’d love to see you do a post on how bereavement fares have evolved (or not evolved) over the year. Back when I was skinny and had hair, and there were really only four classes of fares: F, FN, Y and YN, the bereavement fares gave a pretty dependable discount on the Y and YN fares. Now, with fares being an absolute alphabet soup, how to the majors and LCCs handle bereavement fares? I know when I did a short stint as an Alaska Airlines res clerk, I could usually beat the heck out of the bereavement fare – but that too, was a long time ago.

Frank V

There’s no question that times have changed. Back in the day, bereavement fares provided a tangible discount over the prevailing rate. The reason for this was simply compassion. People didn’t ever want to take those trips, but they had to and the airlines did what they could to make it a little easier.

As the industry’s fare structure changed and low cost carriers brought lower last minute fares, bereavement fares started to become irrelevant. Oh, they still gave a discount off the full fare. It’s just that nobody paid the full fare anymore.

For low cost carriers, bereavement fares don’t exist for the most part. Southwest, for example, doesn’t offer bereavement fares. Other airlines have varying policies.

American – The website offers a very terse suggestion that bereavement fares may be offered and you need to call them for info. They tend to use an older school approach with flat rates that are very flexible. It tends not to be very helpful.

Continental – They realized that the old model wasn’t helping anyone, so they switched to something new. Now, tickets up to $500 get a 5% discount, tickets between $500 and $1000 get a 10% discount, and tickets over $1000 get a 20% discount.

Delta – They offer a lot more information on bereavement fares on their website but it’s the same end result as American.

United – Like Continental, United has gone with a discount structure, but they’ve opted for simplicity. You can get 10% off any ticket.

As you can see, some of these are good and some bad, but they’re all a pain in the butt. You’re only allowed to take advantage of this for close family members, and each airline has a list of what that includes. You need to provide documentation as well. If someone is sick, you need to give medical contact information so the airline can confirm that this is real. In case of death, you’ll often be asked for the death certificate. It’s not a fun experience. In fact, it’s unpleasant enough to have been a subject of a Seinfeld episode.

But the fares are still out there. They’re just not easy to take advantage of.

Back at the end of April, the rule enacting massive fines to airlines who keep people on an airplane on the ground for more than three hours went into effect. The Department of Transportation just released May’s results and the numbers show that more travelers were inconvenienced. Have you been reading articles about how ground delays are way down? Those aren’t looking at the whole picture. There were fewer ground delays than the previous year, but cancellations were up significantly.

On-time percentage in May 2010 was 79.9 percent across all reporting airlines. It was 80.5 percent in 2009, so it was comparable in that respect. Then we look at cancellations. In 2010, 1.24 percent of flights were canceled. Back in 2009? It was only 0.88 percent. Had the May 2009 rate held through in 2010, nearly 2,000 fewer flights would have been canceled in May of this year. If you assume an average of 100 people on a flight, you get almost 200,000 people who were inconvenienced this year that wouldn’t have been inconvenienced last year. Many have said that it was a small increase in cancellations. That seems pretty big to me.

Now, let’s look at the number of lengthy ground delays. In May 2009, there were 34 flights stuck on the ramp for more than 3 hours. This year, there were 5. If we stick with that 100 passenger per flight number, then we’re at 3,400 people who weren’t sitting on a plane on the ground for more than 3 hours this year. Remember, that compares to an increase of nearly 200,000 people who were inconvenienced by cancellations. Let me put this in a pretty picture:

Are we really making a fair comparison here? After all, there’s no way to directly attribute all the additional cancellations to this rule. There are differences in weather that could also cause large swings. But the increase in cancellations was spread out across airlines. Of the 18 reporting airlines, two-thirds reported an increase in the number of cancellations. Weather alone is not going to cause that to be spread across the country, though it can certainly count for some of it.

But that doesn’t really matter. There’s an even better way to look at this. If only 1.5 percent of those additional cancellations were due to the ground delay rule, then more people still would have been inconvenienced by higher cancellations than were saved from three hour delays. And that assumes that the reduction in long ground delays was entirely due to the new rule, something that’s highly unlikely.

But let’s not stop there. Lets look at the five long ground delays. Four of them were on United in Denver on May 26. That was the day that not only saw thunderstorms roll through the airport, but it also saw a tornado hit. Yeah, think the weather was bad? Maybe we can forgive four airplanes being stuck for that long.

The last one was Delta flight 2011 from Atlanta to Dallas/Ft Worth on May 28. Both airports saw thunderstorms that afternoon, but Atlanta had more than an inch and a half of rain. It was an awful day.

The Delta flight was stuck on the ground for 3 hours and 2 minutes. Yeah, that’s right. It went a mere two minutes over the limit. So I asked Delta what happened. Apparently, the airplane was in a “bad spot” on taxiway and there was lightning so the ramp workers couldn’t come out to meet the airplane. Had the airplane come back to the gate, it would have canceled and the passengers wouldn’t have gotten out of town for at least 10 to 12 hours.

That’s just one more example of when a 3 hour and 2 minute delay isn’t nearly as bad as the alternative. Of course, Kate Hanni, the director of FlyersRights.org thinks it’s a good idea to gloat. She has been quoted as saying “I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so.”

Despite Kate’s claim, there is nothing to gloat about. More people are being inconvenienced than before. So, Kate, I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so.

It’s time once again for us to talk about airline food. I know, it’s your favorite, right? But this is really interesting stuff. As part of Form 41 data that airlines have to submit to the feds, food expense is broken out. Someone brought this to my attention recently, and I played around with the numbers to get a really interesting chart. Here it is, showing food spend per passenger by airline. (Click to blow it up.)

 
There are just so many interesting things to see in this chart. Here are my random thoughts.

• Look at how much money Alaska spent on food in the early 1990s. That’s crazy for an airline that’s mostly short to medium haul flying. Obviously, they changed that significantly in 1993 and now they’re in the bottom half of the pack.
• United and American have been going in lockstep, as you might expect. They hit their peak on food spend in 2001 and then, completely unsurprisingly, tanked from there.
• You can really chart Continental’s success here. The airline dramatically slashed food in the early 1990s in its bid to survive. When Gordon Bethune took over and started investing in the product, food spend started to rise and it’s stayed there. Obviously, this number will start to plunge now that Continental has trashed free food in coach. Interesting that the spend is still less on Continental than United. I wonder if First Class has something to do with that?
• Look at Northwest’s climb at the end of its life. That’s the Delta influence there, but both airlines have stepped up their spending. Much of that is likely related to the airline’s strong, fresh food buy-on-board program.
• US Airways has always been near the bottom, but much of that may be because it has a much higher percentage of domestic flights than the other legacies. You can see the fight for survival after 9/11. Food spend dropped, but you can also see that food at America West started to rise a little after the merger. Now they’ve found equilibrium at a very low level.
• The most steady spender on food? Southwest, of course. Those peanuts are cheap.

Fun chart, huh? Too bad we can’t map this to revenue from food sales, but that info isn’t given to the feds.

keep track of your miles in style – AntiBride.com
The AntiBride liked my previous post about AwardWallet, so I tweaked it and put it up for the wedding crowd.

Pinnacle Acquires Mesaba — and Can’t Wait to Erase the Tarnished Colgan Brand – BNET
Delta sold off two subsidiaries last week. The first is Compass, and that’s not a surprise.

Trans States Wants to Join the Big Leagues of Regional Airlines – BNET
And here’s the other sell-off, which was a much bigger surprise. Trans States buys Compass?!

Bad News: United, Continental Merger Already Seeing Pilot Unrest – BNET
That didn’t take long. The pilots and management are already fighting at the merging airlines.

Spring Thaw: American’s Pilots Turn Toward Reconciliation with Management – BNET
More pilot fun! American’s pilots are looking to talk to management again. It’s a change for the better.

My post on Hubert Horan’s anti-merger stance generated a ton of discussion here, and that was great. While some agreed, others didn’t. Norwegian apparently falls into the latter category, because it wants to jump into the Transatlantic market in a big way starting next year.

One of the important tenets of Hubert’s argument was that these mergers and joint ventures have created an oligopoly over the Atlantic that can’t be broken. This assumes that low cost carriers won’t be able to break into the market successfully in any meaningful way. Norwegian apparently thinks he’s wrong.

In an interview with E24, Norwegian CEO Bjørn Kjos outlined his plans for Transatlantic domination. I should warn you that it’s entirely in Norwegian. Were it not for Google Translate, I would never have known anything about this. (Even with Google Translate, some of this is unintelligible.)

The airline plans to start intercontinental flights to the US and Asia just in time for summer season, 2011. The plan is to have 15 airplanes, no small amount. It’s unclear how many will be flying at the start, but this isn’t just going to be a case of the airline dipping its toes in the water.

Bjørn says he wants the newest and most efficient planes, but I have to assume that will mean something like second-hand A330s or something like that. I can’t imagine we’ll see Norwegian colors on a 787 anytime soon, but then again, stranger things have happened.

If you think this is going to be a true low cost carrier, point to point operation, you’re wrong. Bjørn says that won’t work, and he’s building a hub operation instead. At least he knows that feed is important. And Norwegian does have a fair amount of feed. Take a look at this current route map from Oslo:

Stockholm and Copenhagen are smaller, but still have similarly strong reach. Of course, these don’t all operate every day and aren’t organized in a way where they could perfectly feed into the long haul option at the same time, but if it’s cheap enough, the leisure folks will endure long layovers.

It’s not, however, the leisure folks that really matter the most here. I find myself wondering if these guys are even going to have a shot at the business travel market. If they build a true hub with efficient connections, I suppose it’s possible, but I’m not sure that’ll happen. True, they can get the local traffic in Scandinavia, but, uh, that’s not the world’s biggest market.

I’m sure SAS is just thrilled with this move. Yeah, right. The always-failing airline is now going to face much more competition, if this takes flight. Heck, SAS doesn’t even have 10 widebodies, so Norwegian is looking to just leap right over it. I would just hate to be SAS right now. Actually, I wouldn’t want to be SAS at any time in the last couple decades.

So this Norwegian experiment may very well be the first test for substantial low cost long haul over the Atlantic. I’m skeptical that it’ll work, but hey, stranger things have happened.

[Original Photo via Flickr user kjetil_r]