“When litigator Mitchell Berns was told by Delta that his flight was canceled because of weather, he didn’t get mad. He did research.

He checked with the National Weather Service and found out the airline’s excuse was a sham: Snow wasn’t due for many hours.

See, airlines are allowed by law to cancel flights because of bad weather, but Berns knew at a glance that Delta was just using it as an excuse. He booked with another airline, took off, and then filed suit against Delta in small-claims court to force it to pay back the cost of his replacement flight.

Delta tried to settle the matter by offering him frequent flier miles. But as most travelers are already too aware, frequent flier miles are woefully devalued, over-issued, and flooding the travel market.

As Berns told Fortune — and this is my favorite part of the story — frequent flier miles are “Confederate currency.” Just as Dixie once did, instead of dealing with systemic problems, the airlines are just printing more useless cash to pawn off challengers.

Don’t be pawned off. Say no. Make the company that ripped you off up its game. Berns told Delta he didn’t want its Dixie dollars and that he wouldn’t accept them. Eventually, he got the carrier to pay all but $100 of his expenses.

It’s not just airlines that try to fob off legitimate beefs with pathetic offers ” (via walletpop.com/blog ) by Jason Cochran

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“Return for a moment to 1981 and the dawn of airline deregulation: People Express launches a no-frills service with $29 regional one-ways and $99 coast-to-coast fares cheap enough for almost anyone to fly.

To keep fares low, the discounter forgoes in-flight meals and charges 50 cents for sodas and $2 for a snack pack of salami, cheese and crackers. It earns the nickname “People’s Republic Express” as passengers jam aisles bearing all manner of carry-on items short of caged chickens to avoid a $3 fee per piece of checked luggage.

Leap ahead to mid-2008: Travelers can still book coast-to-coast roundtrips for $198 — which would be about $500 in 1981 dollars adjusted for inflation — and add-on fees are now the industry norm. It’s no wonder airlines are squeezed when we’re paying 40 cents on the dollar nearly three decades later.

Call it the free market meets the tyranny of the masses armed with technology. Consumers wanted cheap fares, the Internet gave us the instantaneous means to find them, and now our tightfistedness has brought a vital industry to the verge of collapse.

Even consumer advocates acknowledge the anarchy that’s resulted 30 years after the Civil Aeronautics Board stopped setting fares and routes. Deregulation has spawned a second-rate system offering little more than Greyhound buses with wings that make five or more often-late stops daily throughout the country to keep seats filled.

“In many ways we’ve seen the enemy and it is us,” concedes David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association. “We’re not willing to pay for better services yet we fully expect them.”

Sleazy survival tactics

To avoid massive losses or bankruptcy, airlines have resorted to charging a host of extra fees that People Express executives might have found deviously ingenious. The reason: They’re such slaves to fare search engines they don’t dare risk raising ticket prices and getting underbid by competitors.

“They can’t raise fares because they have no pricing control,” Stempler says. “It’s not that they don’t have the courage; it would be business suicide to fall out of lockstep.”

Instead, most airlines are nickeling, diming and fifty-dollaring buyers with fees hidden from search-engine sweeps to give the almighty consumers what they demand — except it’s now the illusion of the best-available bargain.

Consider the scope of a la carte pricing on services previously included in ticket costs: $2 sodas at US Airways (LCC) , $7 for a blanket and pillow at JetBlue (JBLU) , $40 for a “choice” window seat on Northwest (NWA) and $50 for a second checked bag at Delta (DAL) . As one blogger on travel-rants.com wrote: “What’s next, charging me to go to the toilet?”

In the height of audacity, several airlines are using the industry’s weak on-time performance as a revenue enhancer by charging extra for seats in the first two rows of coach. Their target market: Travelers needing to catch a connecting flight who fear that they won’t deplane quickly enough if they’re seated in the back rows.

Yet U.S. consumers complain about the airline industry like we do Big Oil when it’s our craving for the absolute lowest prices that’s crippled the industry.

Somewhere in the last 25 years, Americans came to believe cheap air travel is a right to which we’re entitled just like we did cheap gas — until that train left the station. With jet-fuel costs up 50% in the last year, we’re awakening from a similar greed.

The Southwest paradox

Southwest (LUV) is held up as the stellar example of a profitable airline. It’s avoided resorting to tack-on fees thanks to a hedging program that’s helped contain fuel costs. Yet it typifies what’s bad about the post-deregulation era. ” via(foxbusiness.proteus.com) by Chris Pummer

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“DAVID BORAK, an environmental policy analyst fromWashington, has 300,000 frequent-flier miles with United, but for five months now, he hasn’t been able to use them for a family vacation in Rome next summer.

While his dates are flexible, he said there were no seats available for the so-called Saver price of 50,000 miles.Exasperated, he posted a message on FlyerTalk.com, a Web site where travelers share tips about getting the most out of loyalty programs, venting his frustration: “I could not even find one lousy award ticket (economy or business) for IAD-FCO for the next 12 months!” he wrote, using the airport codes for Dulles and Leonardo da Vinci Airports. “What gives?”

There are similar gripes about nearly every frequent-flier program. “I’ve been looking for standard coach seats IAH-HNL for the 1st week of August since last October,” a Continental OnePass member recently posted, referring to the airports in Houston and Honolulu. “No luck whatsoever.” A Southwest Rapid Rewards member who couldn’t find any award seats from Virginia to Denver asked in a post last December, “Is this a trend?”

In a word, yes. Travelers have long complained about the difficulty of booking frequent-flier tickets, but now it’s becoming even harder. One issue is the airline load factor. Seats filled with paying passengers averaged 80 percent in the year ended October, up one percentage point from 2006. The industry considers that level a near-capacity load factor, and as a result, airlines have less incentive to offer award seats on planes they can easily fill with paying passengers.Meanwhile, airlines are issuing miles on credit card payments for everything from groceries to rent, resulting in a glut of miles competing for a shrinking number of seats. On top of this, airlines have been tweaking their frequent-flier programs, making miles both harder to redeem and cheaper in value.”( Via NYtimes.com)

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“By James Gilden
Special to the Chicago Tribune

Scoring a free or low-cost upgrade from coach to business or first class is among the most coveted of traveler perks. And these days, airlines are offering fliers more ways than ever to fill their first- and business-class seats.

Frequent-flier miles, upgrade coupons and vouchers, last-minute paid upgrades and the ever more rare “operational upgrade” are some of the more common paths to a more comfortable flight. All these options and each individual airline’s policies around them have made winning the upgrade game a confusing and sometimes frustrating undertaking.

The rules of the game can change even when you are flying on the same airline.

A colleague of mine was flying from Chicago O’Hare to London’s Heathrow Airport in August on British Airways. She had purchased discounted tickets for her and her husband in World Traveller Plus, BA’s business-class lite, which comes with a bit more leg room than a regular economy class seat.


Four days before her flight she called BA to inquire about an upgrade to business class. For an additional $200 (cost to change the ticket) plus 15,000 frequent flier miles each, she secured business-class seats between Chicago and London.

Upon arrival in London, she inquired at the BA service desk at Heathrow about doing the same for her return flight to Chicago. She was confused and disappointed when she was told no, that only the flights from the States offered that type of upgrade.

Despite repeated queries to a BA spokesman and visiting BA’s Web site, it is about as clear as mud what exactly my colleague paid for and why it was not available on her return flight.



Unraveling all the various rules regarding upgrades is a challenge, even for someone who devotes his life to it.

”Do I get confused? Yes,” said Matthew Bennett, a.k.a. “Mr. Upgrade.” He is the publisher of the Web site FlightBliss.com and the monthly newsletter First Class Flyer, which has about 15,000 subscribers, he said.

”It takes time to understand them,” he says, likening upgrade policies in their complexity to insurance policies. “That’s our job to unravel them.”

The newsletter is written more for the frequent flier and business traveler, not the average leisure traveler. A one-year subscription costs $97. But FlightBliss features a free blog where Bennett weighs in with some of the latest news and tips on upgrades.

My colleague’s upgrade from the States was actually typical if unusual in that it was unavailable on her return flight.

Most airlines these days will not allow passengers who have purchased many types of discounted tickets to use miles to upgrade, especially on international flights. Some, like BA and American Airlines, charge an added fee to upgrade. Others, such as United, only allow upgrading on certain types of fares.

If you are booking tickets on United’s Web site, there is an option to book an upgradeable fare. But for the uninitiated, the array of seven choices is confusing.

I decided to test United’s upgradeable fare options for a flight from O’Hare to Heathrow in mid-November (these fares are for comparison only and may no longer be available).

When I clicked the first category of upgrades using miles — an alphabet soup of 10 fare types — I received a message saying that option was not available. The second option, “miles-MH,” yielded a round-trip economy class “upgrade eligible” fare of $822, or $340 more than the lowest non-upgradeable fare of $482. That is in addition to 30,000 frequent flier miles each way.

But here’s the rub. Even if you pay the extra $340, you are not guaranteed an upgrade. And if your upgrade is waitlisted and does not go through, you are not entitled to a refund even though the only benefit to the higher fare is the ability to upgrade.

Knowing the ins and outs of a particular airline’s policies is key to increasing the odds of getting an upgrade.” [Via chicagotribune.com]

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