I'm curious if he's ever flown much before. Missing the first leg of a discount coach r/t canceling the entire reservation has been standard since at least 1980. Yes, their online systems should be better at explaining what happens once you've missed a flight, but fundamentally the web apps for airlines are dirty hacks layered on top of mainframe systems, and don't handle exceptions particularly well.
Airline pricing is incredibly complex because...it is a complex product. It's a perishable product, and they are trying to price discriminate multiple classes of people, dealing with competitors, etc. It is very common to have the case he considers rare (XXX-YYY-XXX costing >2x what YYY-XXX-YYY costs -- especially international, where different currencies, taxes, etc. apply). XXX-YYY often costs 4-8x the cost of XXX-YYY-XXX or YYY-XXX-YYY r/t, too.
There are certain routes which are run as "air shuttles" -- you can buy a ticket, and then walk on and get on any available flight. SIN-KUL, IAD-NYC, etc. Some airlines have very simple routing and fares (Southwest, for instance) and can more easily be used for flexible travel. First Class or Full Fare Coach tickets are also used by businesses or other travelers who demand extreme flexibility -- the $170 r/t SFO-LAX-SFO was a discounted coach fare where price discrimination in terms of restrictive terms applies.
Additionally, airlines are highly regulated, some by international treaty (read the back of a ticket jacket sometime).
As for "not screwing a major customer over", a frequent flyer would be 1K or GS and worth $50k+/yr to the airline, and would probably have been able to easily get his ticket changed. Yes, price discrimination and market segmentation sucks when you lose the game, but it maximizes revenue for the carrier.
Btw, the "hacker news" of "airline hacking" is flyertalk.com. There are people who craft amazing itineraries and maximize frequent flyer points in ways which seem absurd (scheduling 4 r/t back to back flights across the US to Hawaii just to get miles, or flying SFO - Taipei - LAX for the cost of SFO-LAX to get huge extra miles).
> Yes, their online systems should be better at explaining what happens
I think the system specifically told him that his flight was okay; he got the advance check in. To me, that's more of a flat out lie than a bad job of explaining the situation. I guess what I'm trying to say is, the sentence I quoted should say "do a job at explaining", not a "better" job.
Airlines are one of the most economically marginal, shitty businesses out there. ("easiest way to become a millionaire in the airline industry is to start out a billionaire"). They're also not particularly good at software development. The legacy carriers are huge, and have built software over decades.
I think the low hanging fruit in the airline industry is to hire staff from outside the airline industry in all customer-facing roles (cabin crew, gate staff), which is what Virgin America has done (they largely recruited from hotels vs. other airlines. Hotel/hospitality staff are generally fairly awesome at customer service, even when enforcing rules). That is going to be way more appreciated by customers than doing a billion dollar ticketing overhaul.
United is definitely aware of how to sell tickets which are fully changeable and rerouteable. They also know how to run shuttle service. They just choose not to do so for the cheapest coach ticket price.
I do agree they should have been better at customer relations, even while enforcing the same policy (although if it turns into "please leave or we will call security", there are probably two parties behaving suboptimally). In their defense it's a heavy travel period, and if I were waiting behind him in line, I would have been pissed as well if they had devoted huge amounts of time to explaining their ticketing procedures in depth to him and trying to console him.
Nevermind all that. My comment was purely targetted at the text I quoted.
I just meant that saying "my online system sucks and you shouldn't care (or should be complacent) because its just a hack on top of some legacy system" isn't an excuse you should accept.
Just because you do not feel its worthwhile to replace the underlying system (and I'm not arguing over whether it is or isn't), doesn't make it alright that the end result is bad and certainly does not mean people should accept that reason as an excuse.
I agree it isn't ideal, but given limited resources, there are a lot of cases where having a good manual/human exception handling procedure is a better solution than fixing the software. (And training employees to "be nice to customers, pretend your boss's mother is flying today" would improve all interactions with the airline; fixing this one particular bug wouldn't be as generally beneficial. Realistically United will do neither :)
I agree with what you're saying, but I still can't help but feel you are missing the point I wanted to make (or perhaps you didn't miss it and simply wanted to add to it to tie it back to the article, in which case I apologize and you should feel free to ignore me).
Somebody made a judgement call and decided that X was more cost effective than Y. Somebody else is inconvenienced by this decision and complains about it. Saying that the complaint is invalid because X is a dirty hack is not, IMHO, a valid excuse. Saying (as you have) that it was decided that X was more cost effective than Y and that is why X was chosen is a valid excuse.
The only reason I'mpushing the point is because I hear those kinds of excuses all the time, applied to all sorts of things.
Since you seem to know a bit about "airline hacking", I'm wondering... Would the OP have gotten away with it if he skipped the second leg instead of the first, in a case where the direct flight is more expensive than round-trip? Or do the airlines have a way to discourage that?
I burn return legs all the time, with no consequences. I believe in the 1970s if you did that too much, airlines would potentially blacklist you, but it really isn't a problem now. I've even had airline employees wink wink nudge nudge encourage purchasing a much cheaper r/t vs o/w when the price differential was huge.
Airline pricing is incredibly complex because...it is a complex product. It's a perishable product, and they are trying to price discriminate multiple classes of people, dealing with competitors, etc. It is very common to have the case he considers rare (XXX-YYY-XXX costing >2x what YYY-XXX-YYY costs -- especially international, where different currencies, taxes, etc. apply). XXX-YYY often costs 4-8x the cost of XXX-YYY-XXX or YYY-XXX-YYY r/t, too.
There are certain routes which are run as "air shuttles" -- you can buy a ticket, and then walk on and get on any available flight. SIN-KUL, IAD-NYC, etc. Some airlines have very simple routing and fares (Southwest, for instance) and can more easily be used for flexible travel. First Class or Full Fare Coach tickets are also used by businesses or other travelers who demand extreme flexibility -- the $170 r/t SFO-LAX-SFO was a discounted coach fare where price discrimination in terms of restrictive terms applies.
Additionally, airlines are highly regulated, some by international treaty (read the back of a ticket jacket sometime).
As for "not screwing a major customer over", a frequent flyer would be 1K or GS and worth $50k+/yr to the airline, and would probably have been able to easily get his ticket changed. Yes, price discrimination and market segmentation sucks when you lose the game, but it maximizes revenue for the carrier.
Btw, the "hacker news" of "airline hacking" is flyertalk.com. There are people who craft amazing itineraries and maximize frequent flyer points in ways which seem absurd (scheduling 4 r/t back to back flights across the US to Hawaii just to get miles, or flying SFO - Taipei - LAX for the cost of SFO-LAX to get huge extra miles).