Jeff Gonnason wanted to fly from Anchorage, Alaska, to Portland for his grandmother’s 94th birthday last weekend, and he was counting on a low fare.
And why not? With most planes running half-full and the major airlines on the receiving end of $15 billion in federal money, a lot of passengers were expecting a fare sale to end all fare sales. Instead, they found nothing. In some instances, they even say that prices shot up after the government’s unprecedented bailout.
Alaska Airlines offered Gonnason a $1374.02 rate for a round-trip ticket without a two-week notice. But that’s for the kind of ticket normally bought by business travelers, and it’s so pricey because you’re either booking it on short notice or not staying over a Saturday night, or both. He refused it.
“The airlines want us to fly, but insult us with ridiculous fares or restrictions that are too much bother,” he says. “They’ve made it just too difficult to fly. We’ll just stay home.”
His story is by no means unique. In the past several days, a number of would-be air travelers have complained that airfares were on the upswing since terrorists felled the World Trade Center towers and decimated the Pentagon. The evidence is completely anecdotal so far: An irate caller to a radio talk show. An e-mail sent from a traveler who saw a high fare online. Or a travel agent pulling up a worst-cased scenario itinerary on her computer.
Last week, after Congress pledged to help the airline industry recover from its tailspin, I got queries from numerous reporters asking if fares had been lowered. I said that I expected that they would eventually come down because it’s the only way that passengers would return to the skies. I wasn’t sure when the cuts would come or how deep they’d be.
Turns out that there were some impressive deals immediately following the disaster. For example, Dave Olsen picked up a round-trip ticket from Chicago to Las Vegas on National Airlines for $63.50. He’s also taking his wife and two kids from the Windy City to San Francisco for a total of $374 in mid-October. “I wouldn’t be taking these two trips without the sales, but am glad to participate in their promotion to get people flying again,” says the Jefferson, Wis., funeral home director.
But the vast majority of the carriers went into a kind of holding pattern-neither lowering nor raising prices. This frustrated both travelers, who thought the terrorist attacks would lead to fare sales, and travel writers, who needed a compelling follow-up story to the airline bailout. The resulting reports-from the media and the masses-were confusing, even somewhat misleading. Some publications reported that airfares were holding steady, which violated one of journalism’s basic tenets (if there’s nothing to report, don’t report it).
That, in turn, stirred some doubts. If the news articles were breathlessly reporting that nothing had happened, maybe there was something more to the story. That information void, it now seems, was filled with uninformed conjecture. All it takes is a random check of unrestricted fares to erroneously conclude that airlines are bilking customers, when, in fact, they’ve really done nothing.
When I first wrote about urban myths and travel in 1998, I suggested that the kind of misinformation that could affect travelers concerned crime ring’s intent on harvesting your kidneys or GameBoys that triggered plane crashes by interfering with an aircraft’s navigational systems. But I never suspected that those same kinds of falsehoods would circulate regarding airfares, which are comparatively easy to verify.
Truth is, fares are likely to ease this month. There are signs that carriers have begun dumping excess ticket inventory on websites and through consolidators. But don’t take my word for it. Trying to predict the price of tickets is a lot like forecasting the direction of the stock market.
It’s anyone’s guess.
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