Bait and Switch?! PART ONE

Over on the Consumerist, there's a hearty discussion and debate going on about whether airlines use "bait and switch" techniques to get you to buy plane tickets. It's a valid question, and a problem familiar to most everyone who has ever attempted to book plane tickets online.

Reader Tom shares his story:

"...Tom was all set to buy a ticket on Virgin America when all of a sudden
the fare he thought was locked in shot up 33%. The machine told him his
reservation had expired. Tom tried redoing the purchase several times,
clearing his cookies, changing browsers, only to continue to be denied by
Richard Branson's faceless automaton army..."

Sounds familiar, right? Here's my take:

While the "bait and switch" theory it is definitely a fun and exciting prospect, a more accurate explanation is that the majority of Virgin America's fares are "Instant Purchase" fares. The same is true for most low-cost airlines.

Some of the terms I'm about to use are going to sound like gibberish to people not in the industry, so use my handy glossary if you need to and hang with me here-- I'm going to try to make this as easy to understand as possible.

When you select a flight, and a price, what you're really telling the computer to do is build you a record, also called a "Passenger Name Record" or "PNR," with that flight segment at a particular fare basis.

Let's pretend that you're booking a flight from San Francisco to Las Vegas at the super-cheap $49.00 fare. What you're really doing is selling one segment, in a particular class of service (we're not talking first class or coach class here, we're talking fare class), into a PNR.

Maybe it's Virgin America (VA) flight 387 from San Francisco (SFO) to Las Vegas (LAS) in "V" class on 29-May-2008.

When that segment gets "sold" into your booking, you still have a shell of a booking. The segment shows up as "SS," which means it's not actually confirmed. You can remember what SS means by thinking "Selected Segment." When the segment is SS'd, it's only selected, not confirmed.

When you make the actual booking (put in your name, phone number, payment information, etc...), the segments in the PNR are converted from "SS" to "HK," which means that they're confirmed. You can remember what HK means by thinking "Holds Konfirmed." (Okay, I know that's not spelled correctly, but just play along.)

Some airlines, Alaska (AS) for instance, will let you build and confirm the PNR on their website without entering payment information-- they'll let you hold the space for 24 hours. VA doesn't do that-- you have to pay immediately to get your PNR confirmed. Therefore, the space that
you've got "held" on VA is only SS'd until you actually pay for the flights and complete the transaction. Then, and only then, is when the segments go from SS to HK.

Two things can happen while the segments are SS'd-- someone else can swoop in and buy the seats at that fare right out from under you, especially if there was only one seat left at that fare. That happens all of the time. If there is only one seat left at V class and you're holding onto it with the segment SS'd instead of HK'd, someone else can book that same V class seat and, if they're ready to book-and-buy before you, buy it right out from underneath you.

The other thing that can happen is that the SS hold can expire. When you're dealing with instant purchase tickets, if you you have SS segments held for too long (maybe you pulled some flights on VirginAmerica.com and now you're shopping around on Priceline.com before you make your final decision) the SS segments will cancel themselves and that "instant purchase" price will no longer be valid for the segments that you selected. The computer may tell you that you have to start all over, or it may offer you a higher-priced, not-instant-purchase fare.

This process is standard industry wide and it's really just a computer glitch more than anything else. No big plot here.

Because the airlines don't allow PNR churning (using the same PNR over and over to rebook flights), if you find that you've lost your original price quote, close out your browser window and start all over. If you can rebook it at the same price, awesome. If you can't, it's pretty safe to assume that someone else bought up your cheap ticket.

In this industry, it really is possible that you see a fare and then, 10 seconds later, it isn't available anymore. It's not bait-and-switch, it's reality. Ticket prices, and availability, change by the second and until the segments that you want are HK'd, it's all subject to change.