Getting the Lowest Airline Fares Is a Game of Roulette

On Thursday morning, Oct. 9, the California Public Interest Research Group (CalPIRG) sent scores of staffers and volunteers off on a mission that began with a single phone call, and continued with a couple of thousand more. On the other end were this nation’s largest airlines and several hundred travel agents nationwide.

With each call, the CalPIRG callers asked for the lowest possible air fare on a specific route for a specific date. They asked about 73 pairs of cities, and for two full days, they kept dialing. One day the callers asked for one-week and three-week advance-purchase fares; on the other day, walk-up fares for same-day travel. When it was over they had made 2,160 phone calls. In a simpler world, one with uniform pricing and air fares that live for 24 hours, they would have gotten 219 different answers (three kinds of fares times 73 city-pairs).

In this world, however, they got 1,325 different answers. Seeking quotes for the same flight on the same day, some callers got answers more than $1,000 apart. This doesn’t necessarily mean that anybody is deliberately lying or withholding information, but with the holiday travel season upon us, it doesn’t exactly inspire consumer confidence, either.

“When consumers ask for the lowest fares, they’re not always getting what they’re bargaining for,” said CalPIRG spokesman Jon Golinger. He named major airlines as the prime offenders, noting that travel agencies (who collect commissions from the airlines but operate as independent entrepreneurs) generally quoted lower rates than airline representatives.

In a fairly typical query of airlines and agents, the CalPIRG crew placed eight calls in search of a Charleston, Va.-Los Angeles round-trip, three-week advance-purchase fare, and got four different answers, ranging from $396 to $538. But some cases were far more dramatic. A San Diego travel agent, asked to quote a walk-up round-trip San Diego-Albany, N.Y., fare, came up with $494. A reservations operator for an unnamed airline, answering the same request on the same day, said $1,776.

There is some solace for leisure travelers in CalPIRG’s survey, though. As the economy has boomed and demand for travel has increased in the last two years, most leisure travelers have seen their fares remain relatively stable, or even fall slightly. But for business travelers, who pay top dollar for walk-up and short-notice tickets, it’s been a different story. Earlier this month, the Dow Jones Travel Index showed that while leisure fares fell 14% over the last year, business-travelers’ fares were up 28%.

It would be a mistake to draw too many conclusions from this survey. It had several limitations and may best be considered a broad warning: If you want to know the airline industry’s best fare between two cities on a given day, calling a single airline is just about the worst way to do it.

In placing calls over a 24-hour period, the designers of CalPIRG’s study did not allow for the industry practice of changing fares seven times daily. And they expected a lot from the airlines. In order to fully satisfy a caller seeking the lowest available price, an airline reservations operator or travel agent would not only have to identify the carrier’s lowest available fare, but would have to point out if a competing airline had a better price, or if connecting through another city would be cheaper, or if landing at an alternative airport (such as Newark instead of New York’s Kennedy) would be a better bargain. Though a good travel agent will pose these options, airlines generally don’t, and no law requires them to.

In answering challenges in recent years, airline officials have said their pricing strategy, known as “yield management,” is merely a sophisticated approach to supply and demand. Prices are constantly adjusted, depending on sales so far. Hoteliers have adopted this strategy too.

Consumer advocates, meanwhile, have compared the airlines’ constant adjustments to ticket-scalping, and CalPIRG has joined the advocacy group Consumers Union in calling for the federal Department of Transportation to make airlines disclose more fare information to prospective customers.

Two more findings from the CalPIRG study:

* Though the fare-quote gaps were widest on walk-up fares, some of the imbalances on advance-purchase tickets were similarly striking. One Sacramento travel agent, asked to price a 21-day advance-purchase fare for a round-trip Sacramento-Detroit flight, came up with $210. One airline reservation agent, meanwhile, said $1,835.

* Comparing airline and agent prices, the callers looked at three-week, advance-purchase quotes for 71 city-pairs nationwide. In 51 cases, the agent and airline were within $20 of each other, and in three cases, the airline’s quote was more than $20 lower than the agent’s quote. But in 17 of 71 cases--roughly one flight in four--the travel agent’s quote was more than $20 less than the airline’s. The American Society of Travel Agents has applauded the study, saying it shows the unfairness of airlines’ pricing policies.

“Shop early, shop often and shop around,” says CalPIRG’s Golinger.

Reynolds travels anonymously at the newspaper’s expense, accepting no special discounts or subsidized trips. He welcomes comments and suggestions, but cannot respond individually to letters and calls. Write Travel Insider, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053 or e-mail chris.reynolds@latimes.com.