Why is it then when I buy an airticket, the money I pay my travel agent is a fraction of that printed on the ticket I receive?
For instance, I recently paid S$1641 for a roundtrip, but the ticket itself quotes the price as being S$6179. Where’d the S$4538 go?
The reply I got from some people was that the printed price is what you pay if you buy the ticket directly from the airline.
This raises a very obvious question. Why would anyone be so moronic as to pay quadruple the amount? And why would the airline give travel agents such high “rebates”? It makes no sense to me.
It’s just the way airlines do things. If you have to travel last minute then you pay the full fare. Also, if you travel at peak times. If you can book in advance it’s much, much cheaper.
For example, flying with Ryanair, it would cost me 194 UKP to fly to Brussels and back this weekend, travelling on Friday evening and returning Sunday evening. If I could instead travel on Wednesday 21st and return on the 28th, it would only cost 20 UKP. When I take holidays I tend to try and make it midweek to midweek so I can fly back to Scotland.
Well, I’m a corporate travel agent, sitting at my desk right now. The price that’s actually printed on the passenger reciept portion of your ticket should only have the price you paid, plus the tax breakdown (required by law). Some agencies print a kind of cover sheet coupon that looks like it’s part of the ticket and since it’s all stapled together and looks official who’d know? There are one or two lines on the real reciept that the travel agency could use to print the hugely offensive full-coach-no-discount fare, if they wanted to. It might be a gimmick to make you think that if you bought your ticket from anyone else you’d pay a truckload of money more. Lame. We in the travel management industry do this all the time but usually for corporate clients only. Makes our quarterly reports look like we’re “saving” them alot of money.
Well, “full coach” means a ticket in coach class, you know, the cheap, no-legroom part of the plane. and “no discount” means… uh, no discount. So, if I walked up to the United Airline ticket counter and bought a round trip ticket New York to Los Angeles for 12 July returning on 13 July with 1 hour before the flight took off, I’d pay $2663.00.
But if I shopped around I could get that ticket for about $300 or so provided I included a saturday night stay, a 30 day advance payment, and if it was non-refundable.
The Airlines pricing structure is one of the most convoluted and byzantine formulas around. A working knowledge of Chaos theory helps but to boil it down…
The longer in the future you plan to fly, and the more flexible you are, the cheaper the fare. Less advance time, less flexibility, higher fare.
As Bmalion pointed out, there is such a thing as a “full-fare” ticket. There has to be something to base all the discounts on, after all. This ticket is shockingly expensive. But almost noone ever actually pays it - that’s where all the discounts come into play. For one one-way ticket there can be 20 or 30 discounted fares based on date of travel, how soon prior to travel you buy your ticket, etc. The published full-fare price is used as a baseline for calculating discounts.
The only reason I can think of this fare being printed on your ticket is so that the travel agent/agency can make you think that they saved you a ton of money.
Wow, after re-reading this I realize that I’ve pretty much added nothing to what Bmalion said! If I can restate the same thing a few more times, and then a few more people join in and do the same we might actually approach the first level of airline ticket fare complication!!
So why do airlines bother having it, in the first place? I mean, I can understand a tiny store hiking up label prices and then putting up Super Duper Discount posters. But an entire industry? Isn’t that a little old? And given that nobody is falling for it, why bother at all?
I just felt there had to be some other reason beyond merely deluding the customer.
Well, I said “almost” no one ever pays the full-fare price. And here comes the craziness in airlines pricing. If you ramped up the price of a shirt in your store and then put “Giant Discount” stickers on it, you’d have to charge everyone the same price - the “Giant Discount” price. But the airlines charge different fares for different situations - ie someone buying a ticket the day before flying pays more than someone buying a month in advance. They do this because airline seats are not exactly like shirts - there are a limited number, things can change, and most importantly: once that flight departs, empty seats are empty forever! If a flight is undersold, an airline can cancel a flight and move everyone to a later flight. If it’s oversold, they can either discourage extra passengers by raising the price of a ticket or they can schedule another flight or a bigger airplane. The airlines have very complicated algorithms to figure out “revenue management” - the goal is to fill every seat on that airplane. If you fly an airplane with 50 seats empty, that is revenue that you will never get a chance to regain. If you don’t sell 50 shirts, you can always sell them tomorrow. The goal is to maximize the revenue for every flight - and some airlines fly 2,500 flights a day! So they come up with a full-fare price that can be discounted, but the “full-fare” is the maximum that can be charged for that flight.
But remember, someone actually pays that full-fare price. The sap who walks up an hour before a flight and says “I need a ticket” gets soaked. Rather than letting the agent make up some number to charge him, they have full-fare tickets. And if someone really needs a seat on a flight leaving really soon, they pay top dollar for it. In the case of the full-fare tickets, airlines know that time is money, and sometimes someone will pay anything to get where they need to be.