It was only by inadvertently making side-by-side reservations that two business travelers learned ab

Business Travel Coalition (BTC) and Consumer Travel Alliance (CTA) today denounced Delta Air Lines' comfort inn motels practices of charging frequent-flier members higher airfares on its website than consumers comfort inn motels who did not identify themselves as such and call for increased U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) vigilance of airlines' potential unfair and deceptive marketing practices and of airline comfort inn motels compliance with their published customer service commitments.
A few weeks ago, security company comfort inn motels executives Patrick Smith and Steve Lisle were side-by-side comfort inn motels with their laptops open on the same conference table at their company s Minneapolis office, trying to book tickets on the same flight to St. Louis. Smith was logged in as a frequent flier. Lisle wasn t. In three out of five of their tests, fares for the frequent flier were consistently comfort inn motels higher, including a $124 price difference for a trip to Los Angeles, the two told WCCO-TV in Minneapolis, which first reported their experience on Tuesday night.
comfort inn motels This episode or "computer comfort inn motels glitch," as Delta identified it, clearly comfort inn motels demonstrates the need for comprehensive comparison-shopping across airlines. If this is what some airlines have in mind – for their most valued customers when they say that they want to "customize offerings to the individual traveler," then all consumers should be on guard.
According to Kevin Mitchell, BTC Chairman, "This development shows that there must be a system that empowers consumers to compare and purchase all airfare offerings and ancillary fees across airlines to guard against rogue airline actions that short-circuit the free market and deceive both business and leisure travelers."
It was only by inadvertently making side-by-side reservations that two business travelers learned about the differences in airfares displayed for frequent fliers compared with airfares displayed for consumers who signed into Delta.com without a frequent flier number.
It would appear from reports that one of the benefits of belonging to Delta's SkyMiles program is the privilege to pay more for your airfare. When it comes to prices, it's time for airlines to start telling the whole truth.
Delta Air Lines, by displaying on their website two different airfares at the same time to separate passengers, is violating their own customer service commitment displayed on its website's legal pages. comfort inn motels Delta's duplicity was repeatedly tested and verified by independent media researchers.
A consumer being forced to shift between reservation records on separate computers to replicate comfort inn motels the price differences would not discover these price differences because of the dynamic nature of airfares. It is only when all pricing alternatives are shown on a single screen, or on side-by-side screens, that pricing manipulations like this can be discovered.
Anyone fluent in software development and deployment knows that these kinds of issues rarely come about without careful coding and thorough comfort inn motels testing. The fact that Delta admits that this situation comfort inn motels has existed for several months suggests that the issue was not a mistake, but a conscious IT initiative comfort inn motels designed to extract maximum revenue from passengers used to paying more than the rock-bottom airfares.
BTC and CTA both call for a DOT review of apparently deceptive airline price display practices not only for airfares, but also for the growing numbers of ancillary fees, especially baggage and seat-reservation fees.
I have been suspicious of similar practices by United.  I have had several experiences in which prices found before I logged in were less than those encountered once I did log in.  I then used a second comfort inn motels browser to verify the lower prices and they were still there.
Ok, so how do we short circuit this subterfuge?  My only thought is to make the purchase without logging in or inputting my normal login ..then once the purchase is made, go back and enter my frequent flier number?
Globe, I have seen similar issues on multiple sites the price goes in once I log in.  i always assumed it was simply the lower fare had been sold.  Now I am not so sure.  I ll have to do some research on my own next tim this happens.
Typical and disgusting airline hypocrisy. comfort inn motels Let an airline catch a paying customer doing Hidden City, Back-to-Back, or Throwaway ticketing, and you can bet your FF miles they ll come down hard on the traveler-many times stealing their frequent flyer miles or charging any difference to the traveler or booking agent.
But the airline gets to pull shenanigans like this, and never gets scrutinized unless it s exposed.  And then no penalty, no fee, no repercussions.  The only chance of penalizing the airline is an article like this one, which hopefully comfort inn motels will result in a loss of revenue for the cheating airline by pissing off it s best customers enough that they ll go elsewhere to spend their money.
Add up all the cheap fares, then layer the cost of billions of taxpayers dollars for airline bailouts, throw in your baggage fees, and voila, we might be better off with what we had before. At least the airlines would have a harder time cheating us using scams like this!
The GDS are regulated but not websites, so this doesn t surprise me one bit. Not even on the airline s websites are you shown all flights or live availability, so of course prices could change during the booking process.  With the comparison given in this article of two different prices, without knowing about the class of service each were booking in at the moment, it makes it hard to know if this was a clear cut case or if timing was such, the last seat in inventory was being held, hence the difference in price.  You don t see classes of service online, just price and price is based on class of service.  I have said it before, what you don t see online as a DIY er could be costing you.
Actually, I am a coder (not with Delta), comfort inn motels and I can assure you that the truth is far more nuanced than what you ve presented here. It s true that changes don t (or, at least, shouldn t) happen except without careful coding and thorough testing but it is extremely difficult to test for all the possible problems on a complex system such as Delta s. I work on a much less sophisticated system, and I struggle to make sure that new enhancements don t break existing functions; the vast majority comfort inn motels of the time I catch problems before they impact anyone in the real world, comfort inn motels but sometimes I miss things because the connections are not always easy to track and test. The same is true of development projects at every level of sophistication, from government agencies down to weekend app programmers.
The fact that the discrepancy happened 3 out of 5 times (rather than every time) and the fact that it affected fares in both directions (according to the linked article, but not mentioned in your report) lends support to Delta s explanation: Unless a program is explicitly designed to randomize its results (which would be an odd business practice to enshrine in code), computers will be consistent above all else. This sounds to me more like a try/catch error: The computer tries to do something that it expects will succeed but it has a routine to handle the problem gracefully if that thing fails. I suspect that it tried to search for the fare, succeeded 2 out of 5 times, and displayed the correct fare, but that it failed 3 out of 5 times, and thus used a different algorithm after those failures, which led it to report a different comfort inn motels fare.
I ll grant you that this is a big mistake, one that would anger me greatly if I were affected by it but you don t have enough comfort inn motels information to imply that it is sinister, or even to use the word manipulating as you did in the headline.
comfort inn motels Nowhere in your article do you cite any Delta executive as making such an admission. And in the linked article from the Detroit Free Press that seems to be your only source, Delta pinpointed the onset of the error to a search algorithm upgrade less than 3 weeks ago, not several months ago.
Hello.  I just spoke with Delta Airlines.  They (just yesterday?) posted an internal notice stating that upon further internal investigations, no discrepancies were found.  I am curious to see if and when this determination will reach the press.
comfort inn motels We sell items online for 25% higher than you can get in the stores, yet online sales are strong.  People THINK that online gets them a better deal and perhaps in some areas that is true but for many it isn t.
Won t happen.  Those items are considered confidential and trade secrets respectively.  I know of few companies which provide similar provileged information (such as costs, yields, etc.) to the public and rightfully so.  Transparency is not a universal right.
I m a little fuzzy as to how this qualifies as deceptive comfort inn motels or fraudulent, comfort inn motels which would put it under DOT jurisdiction.  It may be stupid, short-sighted, and 100% guaranteed to eventually backfire, but I don t see how this is in any way illegal.
@tabreu1604 is right on the money. As unsettling as Delta s pricing differentials may be, there is no DOT mandate against it. This is why comparison comfort inn motels websites are so important. DOT, at the moment, I believe, is concerned with the statement note in their Customer Commitment quoted by @tabreu1604. It turns out that Delta s statement is a flat out lie, or was during this glitch. I think the only glitch was that they got caught by the freak happening of two passengers sitting side-by-side looking up identical itineraries — one using their FF account comfort inn motels and the other searching without.
I am not a bit surprised! Delta has nickled and dimed their loyal customers since taking over NWA! Those of us in DTW need some competition to Delta Southwest should become a bigger player in the DTW marketplace.