The Airline and your MONEY

Since the last couple of weeks my wife and I were trying to make up our minds as to how to spend our Christmas and New Year holidays. It had been quite a while since we had travelled anywhere and I felt that the upcoming holidays would be a good time to get away from our routine daily lives in Boston. But thanks to our ever glorious gift of procrastinating till the last moment, it was too late to buy a ticket to any part of the country for Christmas. The obvious reason being that the ticket prices had skyrocketed in the mean time and just did not seem worth it, hence travelling for Christmas was out of the question.
We were now left with the New Year weekend, and we finally decided last night to fly down to Charlotte, NC to visit my wife’s cousins who had given birth to triplets few months back. So having finally decided the location, we sat down in front of our computer and began the arduous task of finding the cheapest itinerary and flights in typical Andhra style. I was meaning to use my unused Northwest airlines flight ticket from earlier this year which was due to expire in couple of months. I had paid $270 for that earlier flight that did not take place. After punching in the numbers I noticed that there were round trip fares for the New Year weekend starting at $225, which was a reasonable price based on the travel season, so having selected the itinerary I refreshed the page and entered the number 2 in the passenger field and re-did the flight search on the NWA website, to my wife’s and my astonishment in the 30 seconds between querying for a single passenger and querying now for 2 passengers the ticket per person shot up to $270. I had a blackout!! .deciding to get to the bottom of this diabolical change, I opened a new window in my computer and redid the search with the same itinerary in both the NWA website and one of the regular travel websites, and once again I saw that the previous lower price of $225.
This experiment only added to my astonishment and confusion, but at the same time more determined to get to the bottom of this. At this point my wife suggested that I delete my browsing history in IE and also all the cookies, this idea being based on a article mentioning this exact same occurrence. So after following my wife’s advice I tried the search again, but alas to no avail, the same crappy difference in prices for travelling single and travelling as a couple came up again. After a further 10 minutes of trial and error and crazy experimentation, I could fool the the NWA website no more. Ultimately I came to the sad conclusion that it is infact a crime to travel as a couple on NWA and hence I have to pay a higher price. I don’t know if this is how the other airline websites work, but by this point in time I was too angry to experiment anymore. I tried very hard to cool myself down at this grave injustice, but just could not help but try to think about the logic in the way in which the airline pricing program was working. It was just hard for me to understand the thinking and frankly the ingenuity behind the guy who designed this software such that it showed a higher price for travelling as a couple or group. I was just so pissed , I started cursing the airline and the software designer ( probably a desi consultant, like a lot of my friends, no offence guys ) who went along with this devious scheme. Its amazing sometimes how people find better and better ways with the passage of time to fleece you of your money in every unimaginable way possible.
And finally in no small measure, as if to the say the icing on the cake, when I finally resigned to buying the tickets for my wife and I, I entered my old e-ticket number info to redeem the credit and then the site informs me that there would be a $100 itinerary change fee for reusing my old ticket, as soon as I saw that message, there was no more self control left in me, I just let loose and ended up cursing anybody who was even remotely related to the airline industry. I just let off so much steam that words can’t describe it ( wouldn’t be wise either). Alas as a humble commoner with no other means of getting from Boston to Charlotte, except by a stealing airline which comes up with all these means of stealing your hard earned dollars I ended up paying the extra money and making the reservations for the both of us.
In the recent past I have come across a lot of news reports emanating out of India and from my friends in my dear Andhra, which talk about how the domestic airlines ( especially Air Deccan ), are similarly fleecing airline passengers, with overbooked and cancelled flights, the very reasons that we have become so used to hearing in America. Hence the bottom line I guess is in this globalised village that the world has now become, our biggest achievement has been finding common ground on the ways and means to flecce the common airline passenger. What is the solution to the above problem you ask?, simple just buy your own freaking plane!!, and if you can’t afford it, just SHUT UP and PAY UP.