Hiya,
Here's an article I'm about to place with a few newspapers. Keen to get your feedback ! No idea what the rules are on this site, if any, regarding commercial activities, but rest assured I couldn't give a bugger about being remunerated for this story, although if they offer me cash I'll probably take it. OK, so here we go.
Flown on a red dot special cheapie air ticket lately ? Couldn't make the flight and forfeited the ticket ? I'll bet you wrote the cost off as the price you pay for buying a cheap air ticket. Well guess what - the airline owes you about $40 ($150 for international flights) and it has no intention of refunding it back to you unless you go out of your way to ask for it. You might expect this sort of reluctance from the corner shop, but huge corporate entities with reputations to protect ? What does this say about their honesty and sense of decency ?
Some years ago the airlines got into the lark of shoving a number of
charges and taxes into a separate bucket to the sticker ticket
price. This has been a global phenomenon, and we are now used to
seeing headline international fares increase by about $300 when
taxes and various other supposedly "non-operational" costs are
loaded into the fare. The airlines like doing this because (1) it
makes their fares look cheap to gormless travellers and (2) it
effectively dilutes the value of the frequent flyer points they
issue. Want to fly from Melbourne to Sydney ? That'll be 18,000
points, oh and $40 to cover these nasty landing fees, and various
other charges over which we have no control. There's a fuel levy in
there also to cover the high cost of fuel these days, the largest
component in the bucket - funny they treat that as
"non-operational". You might be excused for thinking that fuel was
just one of the regular cost inputs into running an airline.
Also over the last 15 years or so we've seen aggressive yield
management by the airlines, segmenting their fares into categories
with varying levels of constraint over flexibility and redeemability
attached. Buy the cheapest possible ticket and it's likely to be
completely non-refundable if you miss the flight. But here's the
beauty of it: if the airlines are going to treat the "taxes etc"
bucket as non-operational costs, they can't then turn around and
claim they've incurred those costs if you don't make the flight.
It's your money, and they owe it to you. They are somewhat shy in
making this known, however.
My own flying behaviour is prolific and it occurred to me one day
that I could claim some of the money back when I wasted a ticket
through my frequent no-shows. Calls to both Virgin and Qantas
confirm that this is indeed the case. I sent a note to Qantas
Corporate Communications before penning this article, as a courtesy,
to allow the airline to justify its seemingly unconscionable
behaviour. I received a note back asking me who I was writing the story for. I told them it was for a few minor news outlets. No response - three parts arrogance, four parts
banditry, and three parts naivety - an uncharming mix indeed.
Let's do some back of the envelope calculations here.
Using the traffic and capacity statistics available on the Qantas
website at
About Qantas - Investors - Traffic & Capacity Stats
<http://www.qantas.com.au/info/about/investors/trafficStats>, and
assuming for simplicity that Jetstar is split 50/50
domestically/international, we see that Qantas carried 20.02 million
passengers domestically and 10.50 million passengers internationally
in the nine months to April 2007. Grossing this up to a full year,
estimating the "taxes etc" bucket to be $40 for domestic flights and
$150 for international, and no-show forfeiture rates at 1% for
domestic and 0.5% for international, we can estimate that Qantas has
collected about $21.17 million of Other People's Money through the
"taxes etc" bucket, which does not belong to Qantas, and which the
airline appears to make no effort to return to its rightful owners.
Great if you're a Qantas shareholder, not so great if you're a
Qantas customer.
Can we have it back please ?
) in personal responsibility. So... SURE it could be easier to do... whatever.... but the basic responsibility for doing .. whatever... rests with the interested party... in this case I'd suggest the person who paid for the ticket, then simply didn't show.. should be the responsible party when "effort" is required for a refund...
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