American Airlines just came out and said that they want to “better personalize price offers based on who is buying the ticket.” Wait a minute Mr. AA! Consumers don’t want you making their decisions for for them. Tell us your prices. Then let us decide what to buy and from whom. Just who the hell do you think you are?
Consumers already know that the airline doesn’t want to give consumers a menu of services and prices. They registered their disgust with the airline practice of hidden airline fees when more than 60,000 passengers signed a petition to Sec. LaHood as part of the month-long Mad as Hell about Hidden Airline Fees campaign last September.
Evidently, American Airlines didn’t bother to take notice. Their response has always been something along the lines of, “We think passengers should pay us for the privilege of purchasing our tickets.” Now, they are adding a new AA mantra, “We know why you fly and we are going to sell you what we ‘know’ you really want.”
Give me a break. First AA hides their ancillary fees from passengers by not revealing them to travel agents of any kind. Next, they decide that they need to make airfares more difficult to compare by trying to force an untested and flawed propriety ticketing pipeline on travel agents and hence consumers.
This is a company that only seems to know one way of doing business — confuse your customer. What happened to simple honesty and transparency in pricing?
In an astounding statement in TIME magazine:
American insists its model will be better for customers. Cory Garner, American’s director of distribution strategy, highlighted a perk of the system, saying customers would be able to view the total trip cost up front rather than be hit by fees on the day of travel. “Direct Connect gives customers visibility and control of their entire trip, especially the cost of the trip, as opposed to today’s world where they can see only base fares,” Garner told TIME.
After hiding their ancillary fees for more than two years, AA has decided that it wants to use these fees as a way to differentiate their “product.” They rightly claim that they are not only selling a seat between JFK and LAX, but a suite of services. Finally! They are admitting that they have been hiding the whole product from us.
AA official reason (if you read between the lines): The GDS devil made me do it. Their technology isn’t good enough for us.
American is trying to get travel agents to adopt a “direct connection” technology that would let customers shop based on various ancillary services rather than fares, which is the primary basis for the typical online travel agency comparison.
American says the publishing methods and pricing currently used by many travel agencies are outdated and do not reflect the increased reliance by airlines on sales of ancillary services such as bag checks, meals and priority seating. It is an omission that prevents carriers from offering the lowest prices, said AMR spokesman Ryan Mikolasik.
How is that for double-speak. It’s enough to churn a consumer’s stomach. It could read (my translation):
American is really saying, “Since we do not give travel agents any ancillary fee information and because we depend more and more on these extra fees for our profits, the systems travel agents use cannot offer passengers the true price.”
The easy solution — disclose your fees through the distribution systems that are tried and tested and that have international reach across the entire travel spectrum.
The AA solution — demand that the entire world of airline distribution change so that AA can not only make fees hard to find but also make airfares as difficult to find and even more difficult to compare. Better yet, let’s do it on an untested and not-ready-for-prime-time system that will force the entire travel industry to spend more money and will provide consumers less transparency, less choice, less convenience and eventually higher prices.
That’s the American way.
But wait! As they say on midnight TV, “There’s more!”
Even with the new system, American Airlines’ efforts will be to sell us what the airline wants to sell us by “personalizing” their product for us.
American also argues direct connections will give the airline better access to its customer relationship management database—and provide more direct interaction with sellers—to enable the airline to better personalize and price offers based on who is buying the ticket.
There is no consumer silver lining in AA’s misguided, almost Monty Python-esque, do-our-way-or-the-highway campaign. It is anti-consumer and will only make buying an airline ticket a bigger hassle than it already is.
Hopefully, the Department of Transportation will come out soon with its anticipated rulemaking and mandate that American Airlines and other airlines fully disclose their ancillary fees and allow travel agents to reveal and sell airline tickets that include the total cost of travel, both the base airfare and the services that passengers select.
That’s the way to run an airline.
Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.
