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WSJ: The Tickets Airlines Don't Want You to Buy



 
 
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Old April 14th, 2004, 09:01 AM
Sufaud
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Default WSJ: The Tickets Airlines Don't Want You to Buy

THE MIDDLE SEAT
The Wall Street Journal
April*7,*2004;*Page*D1

By SCOTT MCCARTNEY

The Tickets Airlines Don't Want You to Buy
Travelers Find Ways to Skirt Arcane Fare Restrictions;
The Risks for Serial Offenders


You go duck hunting in Louisiana with Vice President Dick Cheney, and
you fly down from Washington in a government plane. But your
commercial flight back home is expensive -- currently about $698 --
because it's a one-way ticket. What to do?

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently disclosed that he did
what most of us would probably do: He bought a cheaper, round-trip
ticket -- with no intention to use the return leg. Airlines consider
that fraud, but it didn't stop Justice Scalia: "We purchased (because
they were the least expensive) round-trip tickets that cost precisely
what we would have paid if we had gone both down and back on
commercial flights," he wrote in a memo. (The 21-page memo explains
why he didn't recuse himself from a case before the Supreme Court that
involves the vice president.)

The round-trip ticket, which today costs $218, may have seemed a
Solomon-like solution to any ethical issue raised by accepting a free
ride with the vice president.

But airlines call it breach of contract. In fact, it's an emerging
legal battleground: Currently, there's a federal class-action lawsuit
pending against several airlines related to ticketing rules.


TICKETING TRICKS

Breaking airline rules, while technically a breach of the ticket
contract, can yield savings. See some tricks you can use.

Carriers write their elaborate rules to defend their incongruous
fares, and sometimes go to great lengths to enforce them. They dun
travel agencies for issuing tickets that aren't "properly" used. They
sometimes demand higher fares from travelers caught dodging the rules.
And at the height of a crackdown in the late 1990s, airlines even
seized some travelers' frequent-flier miles, saying they were
fraudulently obtained.

But if a Supreme Court justice can skirt irrational rules -- after
all, how can one flight be three times more expensive than two
flights? -- why can't you?

Travel experts say you can. For one thing, it's not illegal. People
engaging in these practices are breaking airline rules, but not
breaking any law -- unless they lie about what they are doing. (More
on that later.) Also, airlines aren't likely to track down first-time
offenders, especially since they need all the customers they can get
and aren't selling many top-dollar, unrestricted tickets anyway.

"It's not a practice we encourage, but there's little we can do about
it," says Jason Schechter, a spokesman for UAL Corp.'s United
Airlines.

One of the airlines' favorite targets is the practice known as a
"hidden city" itinerary. That's when travelers bound for a hub city
book a trip to a cheaper destination, but end their travel at the hub.
Heading home to Detroit from New York? Northwest's unrestricted
one-way fare from New York to Detroit is $559, and its unrestricted
fare from New York to Akron, Ohio, is $221. The Akron ticket means a
stop in Detroit, on the same flight for which Northwest wants to
charge more than twice the price. Book the Akron trip and just get off
the plane in Detroit.

Some travelers use a variation known as "back-to-back" ticketing.
Their strategy is to avoid an expensive midweek business round-trip
fare by buying two cheap round-trip, Saturday-night stay tickets, and
using only one coupon from each. Every big airline except Southwest
Airlines bans the practice. (Southwest's rules allow it, and also
hidden-city ticketing.)

On the high-fare carriers, the savings can be huge. The current
unrestricted fare between New York and Houston on Continental Airlines
is $1,972 round-trip. But someone who plans two weeks in advance can
save a bundle buying two $232 discounted round-trips -- one from New
York to Houston, and throwing away the return, and one from Houston to
New York, and tossing that return, too. Savings: $1,508.

It's tougher for airlines to know this is going on if the tickets are
booked without a frequent-flier number. Or if the two round-trips are
booked with different credit cards or on different airlines (though
most airlines still prohibit that because it's still back-to-back
ticketing).

Airlines say ticketing tricks are actually less frequent these days
than even two years ago because low-fare carriers have forced them to
cut prices and erase a lot of restrictions. "There are better deals
out there," said one pricing executive at a major airline, who asked
that his carrier not be identified.



Still, travelers are pushing the issue. There's a federal class-action
lawsuit pending in the Eastern District of Michigan accusing Northwest
Airlines, Delta Air Lines and others of violating antitrust laws by
conspiring to fix rules against hidden-city ticketing. Travelers were
injured to the tune of at least $4 billion because prices were
"artificially inflated by defendants' illegal and anticompetitive
conduct," the suit alleges. Airlines have denied the allegations in
the suit, and fought it vigorously.

Courts have held so far that airlines do have the right to set their
own rules. They used to be printed, in fine type, on booklets stuffed
into ticket jackets, but in this age of ticketless travel, now you
usually have to go to airline Web sites to look for a "contract of
carriage." Breaking the rules could constitute breach of contract, and
airlines could possibly sue travelers for price differences. That's
highly unlikely.

But where travelers have gotten into legal trouble in the past is by
lying about their intentions when asked after the fact. "Lying to the
airlines in order to get the cheap fare would be fraud, but silence
coupled with a purchase cannot be fraud," says Mark Pestronk, a
Fairfax, Va., attorney who specializes in travel law. "It's perfectly
OK to take advantage of loopholes in tariff rules as long as you're
not actively engaged in lying about it."

In February, for instance, Katun Corp., a Minnesota seller of office
equipment, pleaded guilty to 12 counts of fraud and agreed to pay $11
million in fines and restitution. The U.S. attorney in Minnesota
charged that the company routinely booked cheap tickets in 1994 to
2000, then used "fraudulent manipulation of various airlines'
reservations and ticketing systems" to change return dates without
incurring a penalty. When gate agents detected discrepancies, Katun
employees lied about the reason for the earlier return, the U.S.
attorney's office said.

If caught, airlines can demand higher fees if you haven't yet
completed your travel. If they catch you after the fact, however, they
are stuck, Mr. Pestronk says. If they tried to charge your credit
card, you could protest the charge, and card companies would likely
side with consumers since the charge wasn't authorized.

And now, if we do get caught, we have Justice Scalia to point to as an
example. (A Supreme Court spokesman says he has no further comment on
the ticket.)

The answer for big airlines is not to find more ways to enforce bad
policy, but to fix pricing rules so they make more sense. If they
don't, discount carriers will do it for them. After all, had Justice
Scalia been concerned about his ticket maneuver, he could have saved
even more money -- and done so while fully obeying airline rules -- by
buying a $109 discounted one-way ticket on Southwest Airlines from New
Orleans to Baltimore.


URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1...275858,00.html
 




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