I was asked to make flight reservations for a trip that's already been rescheduled once. That trip got cancelled in the first twenty-four hours, so we didn't have to pay for the tickets. That was the rant I had a few weeks ago about United. An airline I will never, ever fly.
This time, I decided to try American. Which, by the way, after this experience I will probably never fly. We'll see (the jury's out having a smoke).
The reservation process was easy and painless. I got all three seats reserved on all four legs with no muss, no fuss, no bother. Suspecting this trip might also get canceled, I thought I would be clever and buy insurance on the tickets. That way, 'when' the trip got cancelled, for the nominal fee of $76 plus change, we could get a refund on the bulk of the price of the tickets.
W-R-O-N-G!!! (Insert favorite swear words here) It's just like every other insurance policy you buy.
You pay for it - in this case one time - and, when you need to use it, you might just as well have flushed your money down the toilet. It would be better used.
Okay - so these are three tickets. It's almost $1,300. But I ask you: how many insurance policies are bought on each flight each and every day? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands?
The chart below is from a website I found when I Googled "us domestic airline capacity"
http://centreforaviation.com/analysis/the-big-3-us-airlines-american-delta-and-united-increase-3q2015-profits-despite-lower-unit-revenue-245655
United Airlines global top 10 hubs/bases/stations by seats: 21-Sep-2015 to 27-Sep-2015
Look at this. ORD = Chicago O'Hare. 770,282 seats in one - just ONE eight day, non-holiday period.
Okay - that's United. But I'm willing to wager American isn't far behind. Let's say for the sake of discussion, they sell "only" 500,000 seats per eight day period through O'Hare. And I wanted to insure three of those seats - just three. Less than 0.0003% of the seats sold in that eight day period.
Oh! My! Gawd! Yeah - those seats are going to put a HUGE dent in American's profits, aren't they? As if they won't be resold in a quarter of a heartbeat. Given that - why doesn't the airline just not pay Allianz, the insurer, the fees (probably huge) they pay Allianz for the insurance policies. Why not just charge, say... $75 per ticket to allow refundability?
No. When I checked, the refundable tickets were close to twice as expensive - so it's almost an 100% upcharge for refundable tickets through the airline.
To me, that makes zero sense. If the profit margins on each seat are so minimal, why stay in business at all? Why not either: restructure through bankruptcy to get rid of the horrendous union contracts, remodel your business so it runs more efficiently, and keep it private! Then you don't have stockholders and unions holding your passengers at virtual gunpoint.
Or, if you don't want to go that route, have your professional analysts that you already have on staff perform an analysis on the actual cost per seat per route per flight and the actual average number of cancelled / unused tickets per period - twenty-four hour, weekly, monthly, quarterly - and then have them do an analysis of the real cost to your business.
You know why that will happen at about the same time the herd of pigs takes off from O'Hare? Because those things are "hard" (they're not, really. Painful in the short-term, perhaps, but not hard.)
So here's the flip side. I bought the seats. We paid for them with a credit card. American got it's money - and I got the shaft. Actually, I didn't personally, but I have to deal with the shaft that our company will get as a result of the fact that I, as about 99.9999% of the people who buy such insurance, didn't read the fine print.
After all - if you do read the multitude of pages of fine print and you don't like what you're reading, what are you going to do about it? Really? Are you going to try to negotiate? Are you going to not do what you thought would be a good idea? No. Probably not. So, like that 99.9999% of other people I did not read the fine print because it would make no difference in this case.
Now, it falls to me to try to collect the money that paid for three seats that won't be used by three colleagues, but may well be resold and used by others - double profit for the airline, don't you see?
After all, if that flight has too many people wanting to fly on it - and two of the legs are between San Francisco and Chicago and back - and some of those people line up on 'stand-by' and three people who have reservations don't show and check-in before the designated time, the airline can sell those seats to those stand-by passengers.
To say this insurance scam perpetrated by the airlines pisses me off understates the irritation I feel to no small degree.
Plans change. Stuff comes up that interferes with the best-laid plans. But to hold a customer over a barrel and pick their pocket is just plain wrong. And that's what I feel is being done now.
Because the airline and their third-party insurer won't just cancel the tickets so the seats can be resold to other passengers, those seats may well remain empty. In exchange, I get the thrill and pleasure of fighting with an insurance company to recover nearly $1300 that could easily have been credited back to the card against which it was charged.
And, for clarity, I tried to cancel these tickets on Friday afternoon - 72-hours before the flight. It's not like a last minute cancellation or no show.
Given that, why can't the airlines do as most other businesses do?
At the hotel, it's a twenty-four hour notice.
At the car rental agency, they didn't seem to care one way or another, but thanked me for my call.
At my doctor's office which, I realize is a complete non-sequitur in this diatribe, it's a twenty-four hour notice.
Why can't the airlines have the same kind of policy? How about:
If booked a minimum of ten days in advance and if the tickets are cancelled within twenty-four hours of booking, the cancellation is made, no charge.
If the twenty-four hours lapse, but you call to cancel three days - seventy-two hours - in advance, there's a fee of $75 per seat. The airline has three more seats on its flight and can resell them, plus snap up the $75 cancellation charge.
If you wait until the last minute and cancel, sorry bud, you're SOL unless you bought the insurance and have the time, energy and willingness to fight with the insurer to recover your money.
Does that sound unreasonable?
Dang. I'm grumpy.
And I have to take part of my Saturday to call the airline and clarify something the agent said yesterday. These tickets might be reusable later on, within one year, with an up-charge. I need to find out what that up-charge is. Was it a flat $200 - or $60-something per seat, which would probably make sense to take advantage of since the new discussion is to make this trip in January - or was it $200 per ticket, which makes my fight with the insurance agency, assuming I'm successful with the claim, look a bit more cost-effective.
I don't know. All I do know is that I'm grumpy. So, I'm going to grump away here and start looking forward to NaNoWriMo which starts tomorrow.
Have a pain-free day!
Best~
Philippa
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PhilippaStories
No comments:
Post a Comment