Helping Fliers Avoid Change Fees for a Modest Fee
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Your plans suddenly change, and a flight must be switched. Soon you are paying a flight-change fee of $200 or so.
If you're not sure about your plans you have three options:
You can wait until you're sure to buy a ticket
You can buy a ticket at a higher priced, refundable fare
You buy a cheap non-refundable ticket and risk losing on it if you can't take the flight, or need to change it
Flying, overall, got so incredible cheap. I read (meaning I can't give you a source, but it sounds realistic) that taking a flight from Europe to Australia 40 years ago required 8 average monthly salaries. Today it's less than half an average monthly salary.
Sure the perks got less and less and while flying may have been a glamourous, champagne drenched affair then those times are certainly gone; at least in cattle class.
I'm always bugged by whiners complaining that they bought a return flight from New York to London for 399$ and then complain that they can't change it, because they just don't seem to grasp the concept of non-refundable. If you want refundable, that can be had. For 4x the price.
There are a lot of valid gripes about the industry. From penny pinching, to ridiculous fees (like 10EUR to have your boarding pass printed) to rotten "customer service", etc.
But if you buy a cheap ticket, which is sold with restrictions that are communicated up-front then stop whining.
giving the high volume (and thus in particular high statistical predictability available to airlines), the huge spread between refundable and non-refundable strongly suggests that there is something out of whack here.
What are your thoughts on a system that allows for resale of unwanted tickets through a vetted third party (assuming that third party has the proper tools in place to vet purchasers through the normal security checks when buying a flight)?
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yield_management)
While this may seem frustrating I can - to some degree - understand their position, since there would be a business model in that.
A cabin is divided into a number of classes. That's not just first -, business - and economy -, but economy class as such is divided into a number of sub classes, which are sold under different conditions for different fares.
For example: Swiss offers the following fare classes in economy (I assume this goes for the whole Lufthansa group, but didn't check). From most expensive to cheapest:
B, Y
G, H, M, U
Q, S, V, W
E, K, L, T
Let's assume that I buy K class tickets for a flight, from which I assume that it sells out well in advance. Two weeks before the fllight is scheduled and only (much) more expensive tickets in B and M class are available I offer my tickets for sale and share the savings with the buyer, who, in theory would have been willing to pay a much higher price.
So in essence it's the ability of the airlines to price discriminate, which would be endangered if tickets are resellable.
You can argue that this is not right and unfair. Then again it's price discrimination, which enables very cheap flights. Provided you book in a timely manner and accept limited or no flexibility.