Topic of the Week: How Do You Want to Buy Plane Tickets?

Recognizing they are part of an alliance. For example Singapore Airlines keeps deleting my account every year or two despite me flying on them with the account. It is just that I have the miles credited to my UAL account so the balance never changes which they confuse with inactivity. The account matters since you have to enter a boatload of information when booking (eg passport and green card info) and it lets you save those.

Try looking for SFO CMB at United’s site. They’ll come up with bizarre flights but they won’t include using SQ (also Star Alliance) at half the price. Or they send you to Europe to do a second stop on Emirates when Emirates flies direct from SFO.

Perhaps the most annoying thing is just how slow airline sites are. I can understand ones like Kayak/Hipmunk etc because they have to deal the GDS or do similar layers of indirection. But when the airline is presenting its own information without intermediaries there is no reason for it to be showing spinning cursors and stupid animations and instead should be showing results instantly.

Heck what they should do is show results before you enter anything – they can work out where you are geographically and show popular trips and specials without any extra information. Then they can let me enter information to narrow things down like where I am going, when and how long for.

As someone who works with Airline websites & GDS systems every day, in some ways the Websites are great to use. but you can not beat a GDS to be able to work out just some crazy combinations of possible routings as it is limitless what you can find.

But some GDS (i use amadeus at work) are just WAY WAY WAY out of date and they definately need upgrades.

I’ll plug for the “direct connect” model, specifically on a metasearch site like Kayak. What I would really like to see is an option to first pick your city pair and dates, and then a checkbox menu to pick extra services (checked baggage, preferred seats, priority boarding, etc.), along with a box to indicate which carriers you have status on. Then, I would see a display that shows the “all-in” price on all carriers serving that route. For example, I have elite status on AA, but right now, all I see is the base fare. Even if it’s $35 more than the other cheapest option, what I really end up paying is probably going to be the same or less because I have priority boarding and preferred seating included for free on AA, which in all honesty I would probably pay for if I didn’t. It would be nice to just head over to Kayak and have this displayed for me up front on all carriers.

FWIW, I like the new fare display that AA rolled out a few months ago. Each outbound segment displays a roundtrip price, but then when you select the return, it shows how each segment will affect the roundtrip price. I find it especially helpful if I’m thinking about doing a “mixed cabin” routing, i.e. coach one way and business/first on the other. It’s nice to see exactly how much extra upgrading on one leg will run.

Most of my flying is for work, and such I have to use Concur (Carlson Wagonlit) for all of my flight reservations. The way the system presents flights is atrocious and often won’t find the same, or even similar, combinations or pricing that say United or Kayak do. It’s painful and I hate it.

Cranky, wonky, OK, but still great. Thanks.

I’ve ranted about this often enough, I’m know. But, dear airlines, please try to think of your customers, actual and potential. Try to keep it all, display of services, prices, the process for purchasing of a ticket as SIMPLE as possible.

We travelers travel for many reasons. Hardly any two of us, whether for business or pleasure, make choices exactly alike. How much weight each of gives to when we buy tickets, airline brand, aircraft type, seat location, day of travel, time of travel, airports, route, baggage handling, meal service, cabin services, you name it, varies considerably.

And, the business model you use to price is your business. We’ll guess it has a lot to do with supply and demand, but maybe it doesn’t. It’s your business.

But, please try to make it easy for me to understand the services I’m getting for a price. And, try to keep prices something I can understand and something that looks like supply and demand is in effect. And, try best as you can to price for a given service such that it doesn’t look like a “wild” fluctuation, one minute $100, $599 the next.

Don’t use “buckets” when talking about fares. I don’t care about buckets. And, please, nothing like “only 3 tickets left at this price.” It makes me gag. You might as well add: “flight leaves in 27 hours, 19 minutes, 18 minutes, 17 minutes, …!”

Ultimately, down the road, I’d like to see something like the way we buy and sell stocks through an online broker: a sales display by each airline for a seat (1) last seat sales price, (2) airline’s offer for next sale, (3) my chance to make a bid for a finite seat and (4) bingo, sale. Maybe that’s what Cory Garner at American had in mind, I don’t know.

And then, with a ticket and a name, they’ll be a place to go to make changes. Nothing to do with the fare, just here’s what it takes to make that change. Old price, new price (however thay might be establinsed), processing fee. Same name, new ticket, done!

I want plane tickets to be as complicated as possible so I have a leg up on finding the best deals.

I used to think the Orbitz matrix display was pretty neat. Then I heard about Hipmunk, and their timeline display was one of those moments of, “This is awesome! Why did nobody think of this before?”

TripAdvisor’s flight search (a Kayak-like metasearch tool) seems to do the best job of factoring in add on costs. You can tell it what airlines you have elite status with and how many bags you want to check and it can factor in additional fees. But it’s based on their own efforts to compile data, rather than getting the info fed directly from the airline, so it’s not perfect (it doesn’t know, for example, that as a Delta Silver Medallion, I get 1 checked bag free on Alaska).

So the idea of the future that Cranky has described this week, where a third party site can work with the airline to build an offer based on my travel profile and amenities I’m looking for on a particular trip, sounds pretty good. Especially if it’s Hipmunk.

I don’t want to buy plane tickets. I want to buy travel tickets. A couple of years ago I had to go to West Palm Beach, where the airport has no nonstop flights to the L.A. area. Instead of a connecting flight, I flew nonstop to Fort Lauderdale, then continued to West Palm Beach by commuter train. This was faster, cheaper, and more convenient than any air connection. So I want to search for travel options to my actual destination, not an airport destination.

A few years prior I was helping someone who needed to get from London (UK) to Lafayette, LA. Their travel agent (in England) wasn’t able to find any good flight options to New Orleans. They were going to rent a car anyway, so I pointed out that Houston was only an extra hour of driving — problem solved. Again, get me to my destination, not to an airport.