Not that my griping here will cause any airline to alter its policies…but I think they're missing a great way to serve their customers by imposing large "change fees" on the online switching of flight reservations, especially to earlier flights. I just tried to move when I'm flying next week to an hour earlier and to do this, American Airlines wants a $150 "change fee" plus tax for a total of $164. This is more than the entire flight cost in the first place.
I am, of course, not making the swap but there's actually, I just found out, a cheaper way to do this. Instead of paying the $150 to get on the 4 PM flight, I could throw the ticket away, go to Expedia and for $75, buy a whole new ticket on that same 4 PM flight. Isn't that handy to know? I wonder how many people pay change fees and never consider the possibility that a new ticket might cost half as much.
Why do they even have big change fees for things like what I want to do? I understand the airlines don't want passengers tying up their phone lines (and therefore forcing them to hire more people to man them) making a lot of changes…though $150 is a bit steep for a task that would take under two minutes. They also don't want people switching from a flight in April to one in August because the airline may have missed out on the chance to resell that April seat to someone else. But in this case, the flight I'm on and the one to which I wanted to move both seem to have plenty of open seats and I'd be entering the change online myself, taking up the time of no A.A. employee.
There needs to be a name for this practice — and maybe there is — of trying to make money off us making things easier for a company. Lately, I keep being hit up for a "convenience fee" of five or ten bucks a ticket when I order theater tix online or have my tickets e-mailed to me. They're charging me for not calling up, taking up the time of one of their employees and forcing them to print out and handle actual tickets. Ordering online or taking electronic delivery is more convenient for the seller. Why penalize the buyer?
But getting back to the airlines: Imagine if it worked like this. They want us at the airport as early as possible…so I get there early…even earlier than I would now get there. And once I get there but before I check any luggage, I haul out my iPhone and call up an app for that airline that quickly asks the question, "Can I get on an earlier flight?" Maybe I can. Maybe it checks the schedule and even checks the expected wait at security, which is already charted online, and tells me there's an open seat on a flight leaving in 45 minutes and I can switch from my previous reservation which leaves in three hours. If I switch, doesn't that benefit the airline as much as it benefits me? I'd get to my destination sooner and they'd have an extra two hours and fifteen minutes to maybe sell the seat I'd be vacating. If you restricted this to moving to earlier flights (not later) only via online communication, what's the downside for them?
The only one I can think of is that there might be the occasional person now who actually pays the $164 to fly an hour or two earlier. They'd lose that money. But isn't it a lot more likely that this would help them sell seats that might otherwise go unsold? Years ago when I commuted often to and from Vegas, I'd usually check in with a human being and ask that question — "Any way you can get me on an earlier flight?" Often, there was and they were glad to do it with no change fee. In the era of online booking, shouldn't that kind of thing be more common, not less?