Yorick Wilks

We all assume, and have experiences to show, that internet purchasing is transparent and efficient and works to the benefit of everyone, except perhaps small bookshops and their equivalents everywhere: I will never now give up the speed and efficiency of Amazon.com for a bookshop. But a couple of very recent experiences have caused me to wonder whether there are not loopholes being exploited by corporations within the Internet market to trap consumers and prevent them making better choices. I am not suggesting any fraud or systematic conspiracy against the consumer, only that these experiences, with a very large American Airline have shown me the possibility of this, and I am exploring how widespread the practice is that I encountered this week in buying airline tickets. If it is widespread, the need for publicity or even consumer legislation is obvious.

The facts are these: on the main website of a large American Airline I purchased a ticket for £206 for my son to fly in two months from New York to Nevada. I entered the details of my American Express credit card, as I have in the course of many similar purchases. A screen came back saying “Ticket purchased” plus small print to say my electronic ticket and confirmation would follow shortly. On most previous occasions that had come by email within minutes from the company’s computers. Three days later it has not come, and I grew anxious and phoned the airline, because I know the online market is moving at great speed as Christmas approaches and, if I lose this ticket for any reason, I might get a worse bargain. I also know I might do better, as I had seen the same route available for £50 less with US Airways. But I am not very anxious, because I have been a loyal multimillion-mile customer with the large American Airline for 20 years and never had any problem of this sort.

My anxiety increased slightly on phoning because I was told a blatant lie: that the delay in ticketing is because I have a foreign-billed credit card and these must be checked by hand; I am in a queue and the ticket will follow in “ a coupe of days”. This rings all kinds of alarm bells because ticketing is normally instantaneous. It is made clear to me when I ask, and this is approaching the nub of this blog, that although the ticket is PURCHASED it is not TICKETED, and no I cannot cancel the whole transaction. The credit card checking excuse is absurd, because the same card for the same son had been instantly accepted by other US airline websites in the same week, and had I called and made this booking on the phone (for $10 surcharge!) my card would have been accepted instantly. The card-and-manual queue argument is a transparent falsehood.

None of this might matter were it not for another and quite separate experience with the same airline a day earlier, booking a flight for 5 people in the same December period. In that case, I again got the “Ticket Purchased” web page back and thought no more about it. But on returning to check the timings I realised the confirmation and E-ticket had again not come but on phoning I was informed my purchase had been cancelled. It had been cancelled, I was told in rough tones, because I had made two reservations for the same group to two different cities in the US in that period, in Nevada and Texas. I said, as one would, yes but so what: they were both 24 hour options that would automatically expire at no harm to the airline. This is normal practice by consumers; but I had actually purchased one of the reservations with my credit card. Why, I wailed, had they cancelled the one I had purchased and not the other one where I did nothing to follow it up.

I was told that when the computer detected double booking it cancelled all but one reservation “at random”. Now, it cannot be the case that a multi-billion airline is unable to write software for the Internet to cancel an unpurchased reservation in preference to a purchased one. Yet my own naivety and company loyalty sent me back again at this point to the web to buy a new ticket for each of the 5 at £100 more a head. The glitch and the cancellation had just given the American Airline £500 more for absolutely no benefit to me.

It was this earlier experience that has fully roused my suspicions in the case of the second ticket, for the son and still unresolved, that something systematic might be happening here and, whatever it is, fraud or something else, it is unlikely to be mere incompetence on the part of the airline. Consider the issue in market terms: I as a consumer have been trapped now for three days, unable to cancel my “purchased ticket” and buy elsewhere. The American Airline, as I saw with the earlier group of 5 tickets, can cancel that purchase at any time and not even tell me, which could have allowed the group to turn up at an airport at Christmas believing they had Electronic tickets while actually having nothing! By luck I spotted that one in time. This imbalance of power is extraordinary: a consumer trapped and unable to shift options for an indefinite period and a company that may or may not honour the purchase, when it chooses. Its computers could clearly be seeking to sell that same seat to a higher bidder—if that were the case everything we have been taught to believe about internet purchases of such tickets is unreliable. Certainly in the case of the 5 tickets, the Airline reneged on its “tickets purchased” claim and sold them back to me, in effect, for £500 more because I was nervous, loyal ands acting semi-irrationally for fear of having family with no travel at Christmas,

If these practices are being driven by design rather than incompetence the Internet ticket market for major airlines is a far worse bargain for consumers than has generally been thought—and much much better for the airlines—-and the option of buying by phone for $10 more is the best bargain of all.