The travel industry wants you back.
But before you say “yes,” listen to Laura Salisbury, a teacher from San Jose, Calif. She mistakenly typed the wrong return date when she booked a vacation for her and her mother through Expedia.
“All I wanted to do was give my mom a trip of a lifetime to celebrate the successful end of her cancer treatment,” she says. The two women planned to visit Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.
When she asked Expedia for help, it deferred to Delta Air Lines. “A representative at Delta said that the tickets were non-refundable, but that the company would change the flight dates for me for a $200 fee per ticket,” she says. “I said the flight change charge is more than what the tickets even cost, and that new tickets would be cheaper. I was then told that I was welcome to order new tickets if I did not wish to pay the fees.”
Before all of you airline apologists pounce on Salisbury for booking a nonrefundable ticket — and on me for being naïve enough to give her a platform (what part of “nonrefundable don’t I understand?” I can almost hear you saying) — let’s take minute to think about this.
The vacation package she bought didn’t offer a prohibitively expensive, fully-refundable airfare. But more to the point, why couldn’t Expedia go to bat for her? Why couldn’t Delta change her ticket if she made an honest mistake? Is the $400 it would pocket in change fees worth the lifetime of business it will probably lose from her?
There’s no better time to be asking “why” than now. That’s because things probably can’t get any worse for the travel industry. Hotels are in foreclosure, airlines are once again on the verge of bankruptcy, tour operators are selling their products at ridiculous discounts, and destinations are resorting to publicity stunts to attract visitors.
For example, Southwest Airlines held a two-day blowout sale a few weeks ago, in which tickets were offered for less than it costs to fill the tank of an average SUV. The Copley Square Hotel, a luxury hotel in Boston, was hawking rooms for less than the price of a cab ride to Logan Airport. And in a move that can only be described as utter desperation, the notoriously unfriendly Parisians, in an effort to “show that Paris loves its tourists and knows how to welcome them,” strapped on rollerblades and formed an enormous human smile at Place Vendôme.
I’ll give you a few moments to ponder that image.
The fare sales and sideshows may lure some of us back in the near term. But over the long haul, they do nothing to fix the real problem. Basically, we’ve concluded that the travel industry is largely comprised of money-grubbing opportunists, and no fire sale is going to fix that.
But here are a few things that might:
1. Try “yes.”
Instead of gimmicky sales and two-for-ones, why not just stop saying “no”? For instance, why can’t you change the name on airline tickets? Well, airlines insist it’s for “security reasons.” So why do carriers like Allegiant Air allow name changes? Granted, there’s a $50 fee, and Allegiant throws an obscene amount of other surcharges at its passengers. But why not allow the name on a ticket to be changed? Simple thing, really.
2. Roll back recent rule changes.
Some of the recent rule changes, which appear to be designed solely to make a quick buck for travel companies, need to be nullified in order to make us come back. For example, why did car rental companies abbreviate the one-hour grace period for late rentals to half an hour? Why did some of them eliminate it altogether? Answer: They wanted to make more money. But it only made customers upset. Are these ridiculous new policies worth the frustration they cause? Short-term, yes. They do boost revenues. Long term, no. They’ll drive us away.
3. Enough with the fees, already.
It’s time to say it: A la carte fees are a failure. Sure, they bring in lots of money — just look at how much the airlines have made this year from luggage fees — but a closer look reveals an often-negative correlation between fees and profitability. In other words, the more an airline charges in fees, the less profitable it is. Put differently, travel companies aren’t just killing us with their fees. They’re killing themselves.
4. Common sense, please.
Why does a one-way airline ticket cost more than a roundtrip ticket? Why is changing a ticket sometimes more expensive than the ticket itself? These rules make no sense whatsoever to customers, even when you explain the apparent logic behind them. Believe me, I’ve tried. People like Katerina Naumenko, a medical student in Grenada who missed her American Airlines flight and had to pay $544 for the last leg of her flight — which was more than the cost of the entire roundtrip ticket — don’t buy it. (Here’s more on her experience.) “I explained the situation to them and they still insisted that I had to purchase another ticket,” she told me. How about a new rule? The change fee can’t be more than the value of the ticket.
5. No more double dipping.
Ever canceled a hotel room or cruise, and forfeited the entire value of your reservation because of a nonrefundability policy? If you have, maybe you’ve wondered if the travel company ever resold the room or berth, and effectively cashed in on the room twice. It’s a legitimate question: Should a company be able to collect the money two times, or should it offer a refund if it can find someone else to fill the room? Giving the money back, particularly when the room is resold, would go a long way to restoring the goodwill between travelers and the travel industry.
6. Show some compassion.
Here’s a summer travel paradox: Travel companies are bending backward for your business, yet at the same time, they’re throwing the book in their faces when we run afoul of one of their “gotcha” rules. Let’s say you’re delayed by a flight problem and arrive a day late for your vacation. Don’t even bother asking your hotel to adjust your rate. It probably won’t. What if you missed the flight? You’ll lose the value of your ticket, plus you’ll have to pay for a new one. Ditto for your rental car, if you’ve pre-paid for it. But when the tables are turned — when the hotel is oversold, the airline can’t take off because of air traffic control problems, or a hurricane shuts down your hotel — travelers cut the companies a lot of slack without demand for compensation. Why shouldn’t those same companies give us a break? It’s only fair.
I can almost hear those of you in the travel business saying, “Never. We’re not running a charity.” (And a note to the travel agents reading this — take a deep breath. I don’t think of you as being part of the travel industry for the purposes of this discussion. You’re on the traveler’s side, when it comes to fighting these silly policies. You are often victims, too.)
To those of you who think hotels are just lodging and airlines are nothing more than transportation, I have just one thing to say to you: You’re in the wrong business. There’s a reason they refer to the hotel industry as the hospitality business, and it’s a reason you’ve apparently forgotten.
Only now, in a moment of desperation, are travel companies rediscovering what their customers want.
And it’s simple, really. We want a reliable product at a fair price. We don’t want to be taken advantage of. And we want to feel loved.
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The airline business needs a complete overhaul. And I’d suggest starting with seating — flying these days is like riding the bus, except that riding a bus is far more comfortable. In the Consumer’s Bill of Rights should be a MANDATED seat width and pitch — and it should be what first class seats are now. (First class could then be even fancier — like on all of the foreign airlines.) Then people would fly again.
Well said
Chris:
I was told years ago that there’s law that prohibits hotels from charging you for a room cancellation if they are not sold out. Maybe that’s not true, but back when I booked a whole company division’s worth of travel, I used that against an Orlando hotel to get room fees back for three rooms that had been reserved for a week by employees that never called to cancel. It worked.
The trick is that if they aren’t going to be the slightest bit civil about it, you need to know if they had any rooms or not – call, or have someone else, call and ask about availability that day if you’re cancelling without the required 48 or 72 or whatever’s notice.
I would be interested in knowing of what I was told does happen to be a federal or state law.
Thanks for your thoughtful article. RoadRunner’s comment about the bus is right on. I take Greyhound about once a month and it’s way less stressful than flying.
Having said that, I see a lot more “Hurry, $79 coast to coast won’t last forever!” than constructively critically essays. The answer to the silly fees-till-the-cows-come-home is fairs that cover the carries’ cost and provides a reasonable profit.
I think the double-dipping is more of a state law than a federal law, and even then, it may be a different situation with hospitality versus housing. In housing, if you violate a lease by moving out early, and your lease had a penalty of, say, 3 months rent, the landlord cannot just ding you for the 3-month penalty if they found someone else to re-rent the place in the first month. It’s mitigating damages. Not all states have the law, and the law may be different based on the circumstances. Anyway, it seems hospitality should be required to abide by the same rule – if they hold a room for you and you cancel within a certain period, but they can re-rent the room (which they often can), they have to refund a certain amount of your money, maybe 50%. Just a thought.
Seems to me the no name change rule isn’t just a matter of security or a matter of making profit. I can think of at least two other reasons for it:
1) To stop speculators or middlemen from buying up bargain seats, then reselling them at a profit. How would you prevent the scalping of airline tickets?
2) To prevent companies which purchase lots of travel from avoiding purchase of full fare tickets by simply buying up a projected number of cheap seats in phony names in advance, then assigning them later by name to the actual people who end up flying on a given day.
It also seems the argument about a la carte pricing is logically specious. One could just as easily (and likely more accurately) make the case that it is only because of a la carte pricing that the airlines aren’t much worse off than they are.
There are legitimate things the airlines and other travel purveyors can do to make the experience better for more people, but some will never be satisfied no matter what they do. Just moments ago, I read a post by someone who wants the government to mandate first class sized seats for everybody. I hate to have to take the airlines’ side so often, but how whiny can we get?
I think the double-dipping is more of a state law than a federal law, and even then, it may be a different situation with hospitality versus housing. In housing, if you violate a lease by moving out early, and your lease had a penalty of, say, 3 months rent, the landlord cannot just ding you for the 3-month penalty if they found someone else to re-rent the place in the first month. It’s mitigating damages. Not all states have the law, and the law may be different based on the circumstances. Anyway, it seems hospitality should be required to abide by the same rule – if they hold a room for you and you cancel within a certain period, but they can re-rent the room (which they often can), they have to refund a certain amount of your money, maybe 50%. Just a thought.
PS: Forgot to mention good post!
I agree that everyone can’t be satisfied. But one shouldn’t have a knot in their stomach before every flight. This industry is about customers, and clearly some do a better job than others. When i encounter a friendly, helpful airline worker, I thank them. Making customer service and clear, understandable, reasonable rules doesn’t seem like it ought to be hard to do. If it is, then IMHO, greed is a good bet to be a driver.
Well, let me tell you that as far as accommodations are concerned, whenever we can we always rent a timeshare (we use http://www.redweek.com). This is to our advantage because (1) if we’re delayed getting there, it’s still ours – no hassles with the hotel, (2) they cost way less than hotel rates (for example, we stayed at a luxury resort on South Padre Island (TX) for just $76/night, (3) we get more for our money – more bedrooms and a living room (often a dining room, too, and a balcony or deck), a kitchen (which really helps the cost of meals), and the resort’s amenities – not just a pool and hot tub, but often golf, tennis, horseback riding, wind surfing, scuba diving, etc. – no extra charge.