Air Canada has long been the leader in finding things to sell that were not previously offered at all, and it appears they’ve done it again. Now, you can earn some cash by volunteering in advance to be bumped if they need your seat closer to departure. I like the idea a lot, but I do have to wonder if the execution could have been done better.

Unfortunately, it’s not a very straightforward process. Air Canada says that to take advantage of the opportunity, you have to go to the Optiontown website. Apparently, they’re the ones taking the risk here. Once there, you put in your confirmation number and last name and they prepare your offer.

Only parties of 1 or 2 people traveling on Tango or Tango Plus (the cheapest) fares are eligible on flights within Canada or between Canada and the US. Even those people may not be offered the option on every flight. When you enter your information, you get to decide how flexible you are. If you give them a wider range of availability (up to three days), you can earn more than if you just have a few hours of leeway. Once you pick your time range, they give you specific flights within that range from which to choose. At that point, you pick the actual flight that you would be willing to take as an alternate to your original, if they need you.

Finally, you get to choose how far in advance you need to know your plans, either 2 or 4 days prior to departure. If you give them 2 days, they’ll pay you more than if you need 4 days. More flexibility means more money for you.

So how much can you get? They’ll give you up to $7 (USD or CAD) just for signing up. Then if they actually opt to switch you to the new flight, they’ll give you up to $50 more each way. It’s not as much as you could get if you were bumped at the airport, but that makes sense. They’re giving you much more advance notice and they even let you pick your alternative.

This seems like a win-win to me. For Air Canada, they can gain flexibility. If they want to overbook as the flight gets closer, they know how many options they have to move people around. And it will ultimately cost them less to bump people in both monetary and emotional costs. For passengers, they can earn a little extra cash and pick the flight to which they’d want to switch.

My only complaint is that it’s a very complicated system, and you won’t know how much you could make until you actually go through the motions of signing up. That’s a lot of hassle for something that you may not opt to accept if the payment isn’t high enough. But still, it’s better than nothing. Let me know if anyone has the chance to give it a try.

Last week, Delta announced that it would lower its fares at its Cincinnati hub. I’m sure this is a last ditch effort to save the hub from being dismantled, but somehow I doubt it will work. Still, it does mean that there are finally some more affordable fares out there for travelers. But how much more affordable will they be, exactly?

I took one route, Cincinnati to Los Angeles and picked it apart with the help of Rick Seaney over at FareCompare.com, a consumer airline ticket comparison website, to show exactly what kind of discounts we’re talking about here. The verdict? It’s substantial. Let me give you an idea of what I mean. Below, I’ve put together a table with various scenarios of how far in advance someone is booking and how long they would be staying. You can see the new fare structure is significantly cheaper. (These are the published fares and don’t include all taxes, but those would apply equally before and after the change, so the savings are still accurate.)

As you can see, the cuts have come across the board. This ignores all sales fares, so it’s entirely possible that you could get some cheaper fares for advance purchase travel, but this is still a very significant reduction. As I said, it appears to be a last effort to save Cincinnati from its demise as a hub. It’s been said that both Detroit and Cincinnati are showing greater weakness than others for Delta during this economic downturn, and I’m sure that Detroit is in a better position to remain a hub than Cincinnati. Delta must be hoping that this will help the airport become more competitive with surrounding low fare airports like Dayton and Louisville.

For those who want to geek out more, here’s the full comparison by fare basis for Delta’s new and old structures between Cincinnati and LA.

Anyone heard of Airtime Airlines out of South Africa? If not, you’re about to hear about it as every blogger that covers airlines is bound to write about it. These guys want you to buy minutes for travel like you buy minutes for cell phones. Let’s be clear here. This isn’t a good idea.

Before I get into why it’s bad, let’s talk about exactly what it is a little more. You buy a certain number of “minutes” and then you have to spend however many minutes it takes for a flight to complete. Now this isn’t real-time minutes we’re talking about here. It’s just based on the scheduled time. That would really suck if they billed you extra for circling during a thunderstorm, huh? And what if you ran out? Yikes.

The airline was scheduled to start up very soon with flights from Johannesburg to Durban, Port Elizabeth, and Cape Town, but it appears their deal for aircraft fell through. If it does happen, the Durban flight, for example, will take 75 minutes, so that’s how much you’ll have to pay.

It looks like you buy a starter kit with minutes at South African R5.00 (about 50 US cents), and then you top-up as you go. The top-up rate changes whenever they want it to change. When I looked on their obnoxious Flash-powered site, it was R6.00 per minute, so that’s about $50 each way to Durban, but it could go up or down from there. This appears to be the only form of revenue management they have, and that’s why it won’t work.

As my wife said to me, the simplicity in the message to the consumer is about the only thing that they’ve got going for them. It may work in the cell phone world, but for the airlines, this just isn’t a good idea, and it all comes back to the high fixed costs and perishable product in the industry.

Effectively, this ties fares to costs, and it completely ignores demand. Since airlines have high fixed costs and those seats can’t be sold once the plane has departed, the key is to maximize the amount of revenue that goes on to each flight. But this doesn’t allow for that. So let’s say that you sell a bunch of minutes to people who want to go to Cape Town, but you aren’t selling any minutes to people who want to go to Durban. You could try to drop the cost of minutes, but then that will lower the rate for people who want to go to Cape Town as well.

Sure, you could also offer deals to Durban saying that you only need half the minutes for the flight, but once you start getting away from the simple message, then you lose the whole point of the plan in the first place. If a minute doesn’t actually mean a minute, then just stick with fares and don’t bother with calling them “minutes.”

What if there’s a huge cricket match in Durban one weekend. Will you make people use double minutes for the peak time? If you do, people won’t be happy with the sudden and seemingly random devaluation of their purchase. As you can see, the simple method breaks down quickly.

It’s not like this is the first time this has been tried. It’s effectively how US fares were structured before deregulation (but they used miles). And what happened after deregulation? The airlines adjusted fares to match demand in the market. That meant they could lower fares in most places since the comfy confines of regulation had pushed them too high, but it also meant they could offer multiple tiers of fares with a variety of fences to get people to pay closer to what they were willing to pay.

I definitely appreciate the desire to make things easier for the customer, but the high fixed costs and perishable product in this industry make this a bad idea.

Forrester Says Leisure Travel Brand Loyalty Disappearing Rapidly
Forrester says brand loyalty is disappearing. That hardly means that travel companies should just give up. There’s opportunity to be had.

Building a Green Hangar
How about a hangar that can generate more power than it needs? Or one that barely need climate control? The first one of its kind opened this week.

Northwest Forces Delta into Minnesota Commitment
The Twin Cities were worried what would happen when Delta took Northwest. They need to worry no more after coming to an agreement that favors MSP.

Pittsburgh Pours Money Into Delta’s Paris Flight and It Might Work
Delta’s entry into Pittsburgh involves a lot of money coming from the airport. For once, I actually like the idea.

Frontier Begins Offering “Productized” Fares
Frontier is following Air Canada’s lead and launching a tiered airfare structure. I’ve been a fan of this structure for years, and I’m glad to see it’s spreading.

IATA: Premium Traffic Continues to Plummet
It’s no surprise I’m sure, but premium traffic is heading downhill fast all around the world.

I’m sure you’re familiar with Kayak, Sidestep, Farecast, etc in addition to the Expedias, Orbitzes, and Travelocitys of the world. There are obviously plenty of places to book tickets, but there’s another one you probably haven’t heard of that might be worth a look . . . cFares. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts.

These guys have a different model than most. Yes, they are a metasearch site, so you can go on like anywhere else and search for flights. The sorting and filtering functions are fine, and the interface is relatively clean. The only problem with their basic metasearch functionality is that they don’t show you where you’ll buy your ticket until after you click and they send you there. That’s enough for me not to use them were they simply competing with Sidestep directly.

But on top of this, they have their Platinum fares. In short, if you become a Platinum member by paying $50 a year, you can get a rebate to help bring the cost down of your trip. For example, we’re not heading back to see my wife’s family for the holidays this year, but what if we wanted to change our minds? Here’s what cFares shows me.

As you can see, the regular fares are on the right, but Platinum members could save $29 via a rebate. Two of these tickets and you could easily pay for your $50 annual fee.

So how do they do it? It’s pretty interesting actually. Some of the rebate comes from the membership fees, advertising revenue, etc. But they’re also starting to work with airlines and online travel agents who are interested in dynamically changing prices when the search happens.

For example, US Airways (I don’t know if they actually participate, but theoretically) might say that if anyone beats their price by $20, they’ll rebate the difference. cFares can handle that. You would book your ticket on whatever site they send you, and then you enter your confirmation number and they’ll give you the rebate on your credit card.

This makes it worth a look, but it’s definitely not the place to go as your only booking site. On this particular example, I actually found something on Orbitz (via Kayak) for less than even the Platinum rate. On other searches, however, I’ve seen these guys beat everyone else.

Another thing to consider is that they might be sending you to an online travel agent. You might be able to get your own “rebate” by just going to the airline site directly on some occasions.

The rebates also change often. I spoke with the President of the company last week and we both did the same search. For whatever reason, my search showed a rebate of $2 more than his search.

This site isn’t going to replace your existing booking sites, but it’s a good one to add into your toolkit.