Major airlines and sale prices
There are some absurdly cheap long-haul airfares dotted around at the moment. Major airlines seem desperate to fill their planes, and as a result prices have fallen to astonishingly low levels.
Most eye-catching of all is the current Singapore Airlines sale, with return flights to Singapore costing from £295 and rock-bottom deals to Australia (from £389) and New Zealand (from £359) on offer.
Unfortunately the key word in that last sentence is ‘from’. These prices are only available on a limited number of seats, and trying to find which ones is bloody hard work.
Getting that advertised price
This is one of my key bugbears with the travel industry. I struggle to think of any other product where buying what is advertised for the advertised price is such a difficult operation.
The problem is that airlines still work on a model that is increasingly anachronistic. Phone up to say “I want that £295 flight to Singapore,” and you’ll inevitably be asked when you want to fly.
For me – and many others – the answer to that question is “whenever it costs £295”. Increasingly people book their travel around the cheapest prices, not specific dates. Frankly, it doesn’t matter whether I go in September, October or November for that price. Alas, I have a flexibility that the booking systems don’t appear to possess.
Booking systems
They need dates putting in before they can generate a price. It’s no use asking the reservations consultant when the advertised prices are available – they don’t know until they tap the dates in. The same applies booking through the airline website or a travel agent.
It’s a cock-eyed way of going about things, and one that shouldn’t really be too difficult to fix. The person who does fix it and allows a customer to first check by price rather than date or duration is in line to make a fortune.
Ulterior motives?
That is, of course, if the airlines WANT it to be fixed. My suspicion is that they don’t. Singapore Airlines has had plenty of publicity after releasing these prices, but they’d probably much sooner sell flights for a higher price. And if they can get thousands of people looking at their website, investigating potential flights, then that’s just dandy for the airline.
From a customer experience point of view, however, it’s thoroughly unsatisfactory. It’s all too common to enquire in response to an advertised price to find that the price isn’t actually available on any dates. To me, this is malpractice. Firms should not be allowed to keep running an advert saying “flights from £xxx” if those flights are no longer available for £xxx.
Leading the way?
Will this ever change? I hope so. It’s certainly not something that is too difficult to fix, and it will only take one airline to do it before the rest have to follow suit. If Trailblazer Airways starts saying: “We’ve got cheap flights to Sydney, Beijing and Cairo, and these are the precise dates they’re available on,” they have got an excellent unique selling point. Put it on the website, organise the flights in price order rather than date order, and allow people to book straight through. It’s simple, and saves the customer the tiresome rigmarole of entering random dates.
Here’s hoping that one airline will have the balls to make such a move.
Tags: airlines, online travel, Singapore Airlines, Transport, Travel Industry
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