Volatile air fares leave some shoppers insensible

By Bruce Mohl, Globe Staff, 4/21/2002

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Searching for an airline ticket to St. Louis recently, I was reminded of how infuriating the whole ticketing process can be.

There are the annoying airline ads that try to catch your eye by quoting prices for one-way fares. Then there's the hassle of searching close to a dozen Web sites to find what fares are available. And, finally, there's the uneasiness that comes with knowing those fares might disappear at any moment, to be replaced by something far better or far worse.

Phil Bacon, who with his wife runs an agency called Destinations Unlimited, with offices in Cincinnati and Florence, Ky., put it this way: ''As a travel agent who has watched airline industry turmoil over the past 18 years, I and thousands of agents like me know how baffled - and exploited - the general public can be when confronted by volatile air fares. Heck, we are even baffled ourselves.''

Bacon also operates a Web site called Air-fares.com that gives visitors some insight into just how changeable fares can be. Air-fares

.com monitors ticket prices every morning for flights from 50 US airports and highlights the fares that have fallen by more than 20 percent since the day before.

''What stunned us was the volume of daily fare changes, the severity of some of the fare cuts, and their relatively short life without any public notice,'' Bacon said.

There are hundreds of fare changes each day, but typically only a handful greater than 20 percent. Bacon says the biggest reductions rarely last longer than a day, some only a few hours. Some of the recent changes affecting fares out of Boston included round trips to San Diego or Seattle for $155, to Tampa for $74, to Minneapolis for $148, and to Denver or St. Louis for $160.

''If you tune in early, it's possible to get these fares before they evaporate,'' Bacon said.

The St. Louis fare, on United Airlines, caught my eye. Unfortunately, I picked up on it too late. It showed up on Air-fare.com one recent morning and was canceled by 2:37 that afternoon.

Bacon said the United fare to St. Louis was probably a warning shot aimed at American Airlines. American, he said, had been dropping prices on its flights into United's hubs in Denver and Chicago. Bacon said he suspects United dropped its fare from Boston to St. Louis (an American hub via its acquisition of TWA) as a way of saying, ''We can play that way, too.''

''This is the insanity of air-fare pricing,'' Bacon said.

With all the changes, it's not uncommon for airlines to make pricing errors. Bacon said an airline might offer a night flight at a lower price and mistakenly charge the same fare for day flights. Sometimes it's just a typo, charging $200 rather than $2,000 for a round-trip flight from Cincinnati to Orange County, Calif. In January, United offered flights to Paris and Hong Kong for less than $30. Airlines must honor the mistakes if travelers catch them in time.

In many ways, Air-fare.com is the airline equivalent of window shopping. It's not the place you would go to buy a ticket, but it is the place you might visit to see if a fare bargain catches your eye. If one does, you can book it immediately online (through Bacon's travel agency) or use the information to book directly on the airline's Web site.

Booking through Bacon's travel agency comes with an 8 percent fee, but he said the added cost may be worth it because of the personal service provided and the brief window (a week at most) his customers have for changing or canceling a nonrefundable ticket without penalty.

Jon Douglas, news editor at Smarterliving.com, a travel information company based in Cambridge, said Air-fare.com is a helpful Web site as long as travelers understand its limitations. It doesn't include the Web-only or specially-negotiated fares you can find at online travel agencies like Orbitz, Travelocity, or Expedia. It also doesn't track the fares of Southwest Airlines, a low-fare airline available out of Warwick, R.I., and Manchester, N.H.

Air-fare.com also offers only a morning snapshot of the air- fare picture. Typically, airlines feed their fare changes to a Chicago clearinghouse, which sends out an update three times a day to the four leading computer distribution systems used by travel agents and airlines. Bacon said Air-fare.com captures the middle-of-the-night feed, which he says usually contains the biggest fare changes.

Douglas suggested sensible travelers wanting to keep track of routes important to them should also sign up for services that e-mail those changes directly to you when they occur. Yahoo and Travelocity offer this type of service.

''Also, it's one thing to have the information, but it's another to get the seats,'' Douglas said, noting that airlines are notorious for issuing a fare change for a paltry number of seats.

Come to think of it, that's another thing that's infuriating about the ticketing process.

Ticket/ID holders

Massachusetts Port Authority officials say their new ticket/ID holders are helping to keep passenger traffic moving at Logan International Airport. The holders, available inside airline terminals, are designed to help travelers keep their documents handy for inspections at the ticket counter, the security screening checkpoint, and at the gate.

I was skeptical of their usefulness, but Massport spokesman Jose Juves said the constant searching by passengers for documents in wallets or pocketbooks slowed everything down. ''So far,'' he said, ''they have been well received.''

Bruce Mohl can be reached by e-mail at mohl@globe.com.