Why don’t they offer airline flight payment plans for people who might have to fly home for reasons of health or death in the family?
For instance, if you have a very ill family member, you could pay for a flight home, in advance, with a surcharge, that allows you to make an emergency flight home. Buy now, and fly no sooner than 2 months later, but when the emergency happens, on short notice.
I can’t tell you how many people I know who have elderly parents, terminally ill friends or pregnant relatives, who would gladly “pay in advance” to know they could fly home without having to pay for flights home on a day’s notice, at outrageous prices.
The airlines could use the money, they could use the interest on the money and all they are really doing is saving a place for first-available seating for a paying customer.
I would think part of the problem with that would be booking the seats. What happens when a plane gets booked solid, then somone with this purchase plan decides that day he wants to fly? Who gets the seat? The purchase plan guy or the guy who paid for the ticket like normal?
Besides, it seems to me it would only be a short term solution for the airlines financial difficulties. I don’t think they would sell too many of these.
I think airlines give a discounted rate for death in the family. I think they have some big paper-work process that you must go through to get the discount.
So did I. Last summer I had to make an emergency trip home and phoned all the airlines to enquire about apecial rates such as this. It ended up costing me 4 times the amount it would someone who booked a few weeks in advance. It really sucked.
Being able to pay in advance for such emergencies would have been very beneficial. As mentioned, the conflict of booked flights may prove an issue, yet having payed in advance there would obviously be some flexibility.
How about this: Emergency Travel Insurance.
You sign up for an Emergency Travel Insurance plan, pay a set premium each month, and when granny kicks the bucket you buy a ticket and go home and take care of business. Then send the insurance company a picture of the carcass (make sure to get circling buzzards and insects in the shot, for effect) and they reimburse you for your ticket.
Why not simply start a pool with say 100 people into which everyone puts maybe $5 a month? Heck, you could start an “emergency fund” at the office for something like that. Hmm, I don’t really trust all my coworkers that much though, so you’d probably want to have one guy whose job it is to oversee the fund and make sure no one is cheating. Of course he’d want to get reimbursed for his trouble, so you’d probably need more than 100 people. Plus some people are going to have more need to use the fund than others (some have ailing relatives and so on), so they’d be expected to pay more…
Hey, I just reinvented the insurance company.