The new airfare order with fares, surcharges, fees and variations thereof will mean passengers will have to give airlines, travel agencies, GDSs and search engines even more information than ever before to find the lowest airfare. Privacy, once an afterthought when purchasing a ticket will become an issue.
As all consumers who have recently purchased airline tickets and flown on any airline other than Southwest, the recent unbundling of airfares has introduced a new level of complexity into the process.
No longer is airfare the total cost basis for a flight. Today, there is the airfare and then, depending on the the airline, fee after fee. To make matters even more complex, depending on the passenger and their rank in an airline’s frequent flier program, the fees are different.
And wait! There’s more!
Depending on the time that passengers decide to pay, airline fees can change again, depending on the airline. Next, depending on the what credit card a passenger uses to pay for airline travel, the prices change again.
In order to figure out which passenger, paying with what credit card at what time needs to pay what cost to travel, airlines, travel agencies, GDSs and search engines will need far more information about their customers.
TSA wants passenger’s birthdate, gender and soon more. When international ticketing is thrown into the mix, the need for additional information such as visas and passport numbers are needed in order to process any final boarding passes.
All of the above, doesn’t even take into account the growing number of possible airline fees ranging from checked and carry-on baggage to seat assignment fees and check-in fees.
The first problem for consumers is getting the airlines to release all of the fee charges early in the booking process so that passengers can accurately compare tickets. To date, airlines are not releasing this fee data in a timely manner. They send out new airfares five times a day, but customers and their travel agents have to work their way to the end of the process with each airline to figure out what additional charges will be for baggage, seat reservations and even use of credit cards.
Hopefully, the coming FAA Reauthorization Bill will mandate that airline release all fees at the same time they release airfare data. New technologies are in place to handle the dissemination of these fees through the same systems that airlines use to send our airfares.
Getting the fees is the first step. Now with growing complexity of fee variations, airfare shoppers will have to provide more information to accurately compare total flight costs.
Asking a passenger how many checked bags they are plannning to take and whether getting a reserved seat at the time of booking is the easy part. Online travel agencies and GDSs have developed technology that will handle those factors. However new problems come into play when level of frequent flier program, in what program and type of credit card being used to pay for the tickets creates even more variations in airline costs.
The days of an online travel profile are coming. In the future, passengers will have to give different reservation systems more and more personal information in order to figure out what the final cost of their airline ticket will be.
Travelers will need to eventually complete a “travel digital personality,” complete with frequent flier memberships and various credit cards and records of travel documents. At first this will probably be necessary with every online travel agency one uses, but eventually, I predict, travelers will be able to create a central travel profile that can be accessed by both travel agencies and airlines alike to provide the basis of personalized air travel costs.
The more an airline, online travel agency or brick and mortar travel agency knows about their customers, the better they provide optimized air travel costs.
Eventually, each passenger will build up a travel history. Many passengers will have their past travel histories loaded into their profiles. Of course, this information can then be used for other purposes such as targeted advertising.
Let’s say American Airlines decides to offer a bargain trip only for their frequent fliers that are “Gold Level” and higher; they can surgically send emails to just those passengers. Or, United can target pet owners with bargain coupons to encourage future travels. Or, AirTran can offer families guaranteed seating in the same row without the reservation fee.
There is a good side to this and a bad side. If the information is used for actions which consumers approve, they think it is good. When passengers find their information sold and used for purposes other than airline travel, passengers start to feel like big brother is watching them.
He is.
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.
