We all remember, from ancient Biblical stories, the tale of the Tower of Babel. What then passed for civilization reached such evil levels that the solution was to have every group speak a different language, so none could understand the others.
Advance your sundials six or seven thousand years. Go online and try to figure out some airfares. You have Orbitz and Expedia and Travelocity and Cheaptickets and Cheapfares and Travelnow and Qixo and AirGorilla and the limping Priceline…and, and, and. Oh, those are in addition to the airlines’ own Web sites. Try to make sense out of the quoted fares. Yep. It’s a Tower of Babble.
We all are in favor of competition, for two reasons. First, competition provides a non-egocentric way for us to demonstrate our capacity for self-promotion. Second, competition means the giants won’t swallow up the pygmies as they’re doing in broadcast stations. Competition among long-distance phone providers has resulted in the slaughter of 1980s-vintage long-distance rates. That the malefactors of long-distance and cell-phone marketing do such an execrable job is a given, not a reason to object to competition.
But a nasty byproduct of competition does exist: confusion…and airline fares are archetypal examples of confusion.
How is it possible for an airline to charge more for a seat than a discounter charges for that same seat? How is it possible for the same discounter to offer two different prices for the same flight?
Possible? A better word is probable.
And what’s the result? No matter what price the traveler decides is best, that traveler simultaneously decides the fare isn’t the best. There’s a better fare out there somewhere…El Dorado, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, Shangri-La, Nirvana, the Promised Land—no, make that The Promised Landing.
A mild example:
We’re hauling my son Bob from Minneapolis down here to Fort Lauderdale for the Thanksgiving weekend. So we entered the Arabian bazaar that’s the online marketplace for electronic tickets.
Here’s one—$483 for a round trip. Seems quite reasonable. Oops, wait a minute, another source is quoting $466. But if I’ll pay a $15 booking fee, they’ll drop it to $400. Hold it! Two places are quoting $379, plus a $20 booking fee and another is $379 plus a $5 booking fee, equaling the two that price the trip at $384 with no additional fee.
Now, just a second. If the “base” is $379, can I get the airline itself to equal that? Yep. And that’s what I did.
Another test for a route covered by six major airlines had a discounter’s lowest price at $243. The airlines priced the trip from $261 to $267.50. Another discounter paralleled the airlines’ lowest fares and a third also matched the airlines but tacked on a $10 handling fee.
You may question the validity of spending half an hour on this. If you are, you’re overlooking the fascination of looking for deals. That’s why I haunt eBay and uBid, chuckling when I see overeager participants pushing bids up over the retail price for computers and monitors.
As the DRTV line goes: But wait, there’s more.
Just as a sort of educational ploy, we looked for the lowest fare to and from Kansas City, a month or so ahead. The airline’s price was about double the quote from an online discounter. OK, no surprise. Oh? Surprise! One week later, the airline had lowered its quote for the same flight, same days, to less than the discounter. One has to stay alert to beat the game, wouldn’t you agree?
Anyway, the examples I quoted were for harmless domestic flights.
When you’re booking international flights, those $10 differentials can mount into hundreds. For example, a Fort Lauderdale to Paris round trip (yeah, how well I know these flights involve hubs and connections) is $899 from a discounter, $1,051 from the airline direct. And that’s for what the airlines euphemistically call “coach” instead of the more accurate “steerage.” With “Business First” for international flights, the price differential can represent serious money.
Can a travel agent match what we can do ourselves online? Sadly, I’d guess not…because the travel agent would unearth the same numbers and, with today’s nonexistent commission structures, have to mark up the prices.
We’re in a not-so-brave new world. Remember way back in prehistoric times—the year 1996 will do—when the idea of going online to compare fares and flight times would provoke puzzled stares?
Hotels? Another Murderers’ Row. Here’s a hotel in San Francisco whose reservationist and Web site both quote $245. An online hotel specialist lists it at $190, and a travel agent has it for $240 including breakfast. On the other side, the Sheraton Marrakech has a “standard” room for $94, but the same room on the hotel’s Web site is $132. Discounters list a standard room there from $132 to $187.
Moral: Keep your glasses on and your calculator at your elbow.
Direct marketers have all the best of this, because airlines and Travelocity and Cheaptickets and Priceline and Hotels.com are just one facet, in an era of “bots” and multiple choices at our fingertips. Vitamin vendors and car dealers and innumerable sources for loans and electronics and pleasure-enhancers and prescriptions—all these guys are on our turf.
So why does direct marketing have all the best of this? That’s an easy one: Take a look at the rhetorical excrescences on these Web sites. They need us.
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