Proposed airline duplicate-booking software may catch innocent travelers

Most travelers would probably say they aren’t worried about a crackdown on duplicate bookings. But new software being developed by the Airline Reporting Corporation and soon to be tested by American Airlines may complicate the life of innocent travelers as the airline trawls for travelers breaking the airline’s arcane ticketing rules.

Most travel agents, on the other hand, have more than a few stories of about potential problems with double bookings and can easily see where this new software may hit innocent travelers and make their travels even more complex than it already is today.

There is the client who asks for a booking, after they apparently booked the same thing with at least one other agency. (Which agents don’t find out until the airline involved either calls or cancels the duplicate.) My personal record several years ago was a client referral who had identical flights booked five times. Presumably in hopes of getting a better fare.

Sometimes, to be fair, the client asks for a price rather than specifically asking for a booking. But as almost all agents know, without holding space, giving an exact price is nearly impossible, since the space can sell out overnight, or even within an hour. So an agent might make a reservation, just to avoid that problem. And not all clients will admit they are shopping different agencies.

A litany of possible duplicate tickets, real and imagined
The airlines also consider it a duplicate when a traveler tries to use two round-trip tickets and throw away the second half of each to get a better fare. Since the airlines are now billing travel agents for that kind of ticket game, most agencies have stopped playing it. Although a truly savvy client will book one ticket through an agency, and another through a different agency or online, which helps keep them from getting caught.

Unfortunately, another potential duplicate is when people with similar names are on the same flight. American Airlines, in particular, has a program that once caught a so-called duplicate when I had a Sarah Brown booked on the same flight as some other agency had a booking for a Sally Brown. And it took a long phone call with the sales office to make the internal changes to keep American from canceling Sarah Brown’s ticketed record.

In addition, passengers traveling with children who are “juniors” can sometimes trip the system. Not to mention when there actually are two people with the same name.

And all of these possible cases of duplicate-booking confusion, fairly or not, are probably about to get worse.

Dragnet duplicate-booking software and “revenue recovery”
ARC, the Airline Reporting Corporation, (translation, the airline bank which processes agency transactions) is working with American Airlines on a new “revenue recovery tool.” They hope to get other airlines on board, and claim the technology will be able to identify duplicate bookings in “virtual real time across multiple distribution channels.”

So what does this translate to in plain English? The new system is designed to catch any duplicate, and will look at both travel agent and airline computers. It will also potentially catch – even before ticketing – when a traveler makes two bookings with different carriers.

And “revenue recovery” means that the airlines will almost certainly go after offenders with a penalty. American Airline’s Revenue Management director, Rick Elieson stated. “Whether the result of booking error, or conscious manipulation,” these duplicate bookings “cost our airline huge sums of money.”

No one is quite sure, however, exactly what those “revenue recovery” plans are. Currently, if an agent now makes a what a carrier considers a duplicate booking, whether in error or because a client keeps canceling and rebooking the same trip, the airline involved can and sometimes will bill the travel agency.

And due to the contracts between airlines and agents, if the agency cannot convince the airline to waive the charge, the carrier can threaten agencies with, “Pay, or lose the ability to book our flights.”

Now if a traveler books online, collecting a penalty may be more difficult, although if the airline has a credit card to hold a booking, presumably they can debit the credit card, or take away frequent flier miles.

Delayed back-to-back ticketing
It’s not just the pre-planned back-to-back tickets that airlines don’t like. Another potential source of “lost revenue” for airlines comes into play when travelers buy a new discounted ticket to change their return when faced with a change in plans.

Here’s an example. A passenger books a round-trip ticket cross-country, say, San Francisco to Philadelphia. And then decides a day or two in advance that they want to change the return date. Or, maybe, they want to return from New York instead of Philadelphia. For many airlines, the rule says passengers must recalculate the entire ticket cost plus pay a $150 penalty. Which often means passengers might be paying a higher overall fare.

But, there are many discount one-way tickets between JFK to San Francisco these days, in some cases even less than the $150 penalty. Rather than follow airline rules, many savvy travelers book a new return separately, and just don’t use the original return half of your ticket.

Technically, that’s against the way the airlines want passengers to play the game. American Airlines probably will be using their new duplicate booking software to catch scofflaws who book both tickets with American. However, if passengers book a different carrier, the airlines don’t have a way to catch it.

A potential threat to honest travelers
The potential of these kinds of double booking examples and problems are endless. Even if passengers are unlikely to have the same name as someone else booked on their flight, how much work is it going to be for them, or their travel agent, to straighten things out if they get flagged by mistake? The odds of a similar name on the exact same flight might be slim, but the odds of someone else with the same name flying between the same cities and the same date, are a lot higher. The odds increase dramatically of getting ensnared in this duplicate-booking dragnet when the return flights are scanned over several days.

ARC says the system will use “sophisticated technology” and be able to differentiate between people with the same or similar name. But as anyone who’s ever dealt with an airline computer error knows, over-optimism about computer capabilities rule. And mistakes tend not to favor the traveler.

For now, this new “revenue recovery tool” remains a work in progress, and perhaps as American Airlines and ARC continue to work on the software, more and more potential errors will be eliminated. But, if I had to predict, my sense is that though the program may or may not bring the airlines significant new revenue, it is very likely to bring consumers and travel agents significant new hassles.