About those cheap air fares ...

By ROBERT N. JENKINS, Times Travel Editor

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 13, 2000

From the Travel editor's e-mail:

Regarding "Cheap air fares" -- I contacted several airlines listed in your column and was told those fares were not accurate. I was specifically interested in Tampa-Las Vegas round trip for $198.00. They did say that every Sunday they get calls, but they are not true fare quotes.

I trust your newspaper; what gives?

Keeneberny

Keeneberny, those people at the airline reservation desks are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see.

And in this case, what they didn't see is a $198 round trip to Vegas.

(With apologies to the New York Sun and its memorable, "Yes, Virginia" response to an 8-year-old's query about the reality of Santa Claus.)

Let me also note that what the reservationists did not see on their computer screens that same Sunday earlier this month was the $79 round trip to New York that Pamela DiNapoli hoped to buy.

Down here five years from Baldwin, Long Island, Ms. DiNapoli called when she saw that price in the Travel section's every-other-week listing of low-priced plane tickets. "I was ready to fly myself and my whole family up there," she told me. "It was going to a mass series of phone calls" to get everyone back to New York for an impromptu reunion.

Instead, reservationists told her that $79 must be half of a round-trip ticket and that despite the notation in our list that it would be available after March 16, US Airways had no such fares available.

Ms. DiNapoli also queried the Travel editor the next Monday: What gives?

We print the Cheap Air Fares to 18 destinations, to give readers an indication of costs for flights to those places. The fares are sent to the Times electronically by the online travel site Travelocity.com. (It is one of several sites that offer anyone this service. Travelocity researches the fares through the Sabre system, probably the most widely used airline reservations system.)

Before we print the fares, I go online to verify that each price listed is available after the coming Sunday. The explanation box printed with the chart notes that the fares existed on the previous Wednesday. This is the latest the information can be used in the Travel section, which is printed early Thursday mornings.

But for years the airlines have practiced yield-management, an inventory control tactic that lures potential passengers with ultra-low fares. Basically, software programs track every flight's seat sales up to the day of departure. This enables the airlines to raise or lower prices to take advantage of passengers' demand or try to create demand.

When fares are dropped steeply, seats usually are offered with significant restrictions and sold just for brief periods. Increasingly popular are the airlines' own Web site seat sales, typically available for a handful of flights the coming weekend, when business travelers fill far fewer seats.

The biggest obstacle for passengers looking for these bargain fares: There are usually very few seats at those prices.

Thus, even if seats are available at a given price on Wednesday, they may have been sold out by Sunday. What frustrates readers who try to book one of those cheap seats is that often, the lowest/promotional fares disappear from the computer as if they never existed, not merely that they have already been sold.

Airline reservationists and travel agents face hundreds of computer screens full of prices and flight times every day and cannot be expected to remember what used to be available for a given flight, so they tell callers that the fare does not exist. Period.

To the readers, it becomes a question of who is telling the truth. The answer: Both the Times and the airlines, but it is the truth at different moments in time.

The explanation box accompanying Cheap Air Fares states, in boldface type, that these "fares can change daily." The vast majority of the time, seats are available at the printed figures. For instance, Ms. DiNapoli mentioned that she already has a relative flying in after booking a flight she had found earlier in Cheap Air Fares. But when the ticket-sellers say "no" -- or worse yet, "never" -- it makes plenty of folks wonder, "What gives?"

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