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On Tonight's Plane, The Last Plane 18 comments
It has been almost a week living in the UK. I wake up at the Connaught, my favorite hotel in London. As the sun rises over the roofs in Mayfair, I decide that today is the day to fly back home to the States. The hotel makes everything feel comfortable, so we quickly slid into a routine of where to eat and what to do and toward the end we started planning for the next trip. Within a few days, they make it feel like home, but at some point we have to get back to other things… even when we are not paying for any of this.
It started almost by accident when we were teenagers. We would travel whenever we could and our schedules were loose enough that we would always take whatever compensation that we could negotiate to voluntarily bump from flights. It started small. We would spend an extra day in the Caribbean here, in Paris there, and mostly accept whatever we were offered. Typically it amounted to little more than room and board. But we had a sense that we had stumbled onto something, that there was more to this.
Soon, we became part-time professional bumpees. We would plot ahead, using a combination of airline strike schedules and seating charts to determine the most constrained seating supply relative to business travelers with refundable tickets. Such tickets are overbooked in proportion to the airline's assessment of their probability that they will not check in. However, during strikes, non-striking airlines do not typically account for the spike in demand as travelers shift to the remaining planes.
Early on, we would need to show up at the airport, but after a while, they would take our offer to take a bump over the phone. We had pre-established where we wanted to stay, to eat, and how much we would need in vouchers for future flights in addition to new tickets. Due to work schedules, we were unable to keep this going full time, but it works out to approximately $511,000 per year in vouchers for a bumpee couple. Eventually, we gave away tickets as gifts because we had traveled enough on a given airlines.
Relais Christine is our spot to stay in Paris over the week of Thanksgiving. We spent a couple of Thanksgivings in Paris in a row, but were still stuffed with too many Air France vouchers for the number of vacation days we could take. We would always pick up Air France vouchers, but ended up just giving them away to family. We love travel, but we mostly loved the chase. We never knew how many days we would be gone and at the end, would spend our trip home scheming up ways to use our pile of vouchers.
With work and kids, things change. Now, we don't always have the next day free and, happily, the opportunity cost grows with time. But there are also tweaks that have added to our, now rarer, flights as mostly ex-bumpee pros. Here are two: first, US Airways' frequent flyer program occasionally offers a match on miles purchased and then subsequently on miles transferred. We take all that you can get. Net of these two matches, we're next flying to Australia via Singapore for a little over $1,000 each.
The second tweak is one of the Japanese airlines has a frequent flyer program that allows its members to tap directly into their website's master chart of flights and seats for all of their partner airlines. This is the key information that we need to plan without fail for securing bumps. At 35,000, my 3-year old son sat behind a few chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk that they served in a martini glass. "Daddy, do all airplanes have bars?" I had never seen or heard of such a thing at his age. "Well," I said, "apparently all the ones you fly on do".
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This post has 18 comments:
I buy refundable tickets and then call in on the day of the flights. It is especially easy if you have good frequent flyer status and can use the phone numbers associated with those lines. Using a strategy described elsewhere ( http://seekingalpha.co... ), I’ve used airline credit cards to get frequent flyer status on a number of airlines. In my experience, the people who manage the frequent flyer programs are somewhat more flexible and more knowledgeable about rearranging flights and compensating flyers for taking voluntary bumps. Tomorrow will probably be a good day for this strategy, but we’ll see.
1)an airline is striking, so those routes may crowd another airline that flies to the same destinations
2)Busy times of the year like spring break or the summer or Holidays
3)Likelihood for bad weather
4)Looking at seating charts to see which flights are almost full so you buy the ticket on a full flight. Can we see the seating charts on flights before buying a ticket?
Then the day of the flight you call the airline and ask if the flight is overbooked? If no you cancel the flight? If yes you offer to take the bump? In the case you take the bump what happens? They send you a free R/T ticket? They don't try to reschedule your flight?
You had mentioned this weekend you bought some tickets. I would love to know your thought process as to which flights you purchased and the reasons why. And if it worked.
You can see I don't fully get it but always love to learn as it keeps our brain working and our spirit alive and growing. Any corrections to my understanding would be appreciated/
Hope you have a great weekend regardless if you get bumped many times or not at all
Oh, one other travel idea that might be worth trying: United appears to have a very formulaic, possibly computer-generated form response to complaints which comes with 1.) an apology and 2.) a $500 voucher. So, after a short flight on United, I sent a (much deserved) complaint, which generated the $500 voucher. The return trip deserved another complaint, as it turned out, but this time I tested my hypothesis that I was corresponding with a somewhat generous computer by complaining, but this time I sent out four separate complaints from each family member (each of whom was legitimately but subtly aggrieved in some way by flying United). The result? Four identical responses, each with a $500 voucher. As much as I appreciate the gesture on their part, I am discovering more and more to complain about on United…
I can speak to the process from working for one of the airlines that makes up United today. I haven't worked there for 5+ years and I didn't work in the area but I had a former employee become a supervisor in the area. I doubt much has changed.
One usually receives a better response writing a formal letter vs an email. Internal company metrics measured response and resolution of emails vs regular mail differently so of course items suffered. Much of the emails were automated responses, physical not so much. All physical letters were entered into a database with ticket #, FF #, etc. The airlines does a poor job or relationships with family so you would be correct in individual letters. The reimbursement process is generally based on if there is any documentation in their file with you and your case will be helped if you use a specific employees name. First name works as most won't give you a full name, but if you can complain that Stacey the check-in agent did x it helps. Each employee also have limits that mgmt will generally sign off for without mgmt review and reimbursements for vouchers are much more freely given out vs cash as each cash is reviewed by mgmt. When I worked there only about 50% of the vouchers given were ever redeemed and with airlines having such high fixed costs the real incremental cost of that seat is pretty low.
Also, Chris I expect that further complaints will be less successful as they track # of complaints per person or complaints per # of flights taken.
Also, were you successful this past week?
Nice article on free books and stuff. I used to use the US Mint to buy the $1 coins on my cc to get free miles. It was the only way that I knew of to get miles for cash. You could buy $10k worth a time. I would buy $10k, the US mint actually paid for shipping for a while as they wanted them in circulation they would get sent to me I would deposit it in my bank and repeat the process every couple of days. I was able to do this about 1-2 a month. I quit when they limited it to less but was able to take my wife on trip to NZ for a couple $ in taxes on free tickets.
Didn't have the time to buy tickets hope you are successful. Jan a lite travelling month bus in the front and back so it may be tougher. A killing if it was June.
My 7 yo nephew got a $1 gold coin from me in with his card last year. He traded two of them to his 5 yo cousin for her $20 bill. To her two gold coins must be worth more than 1 ugly bill. He's got a future.
Next time you are flying via Singapore, drop me a note.
The complaint strategy works but customer relationship tracking is foiling it. There were reports of one UA pax that was a serial complainer and was lifetime revenue negative due to vouchers.
I would love to know the name of the person you mentioned.
Thanks for the note.
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