I am looking at options to go back to japan for skiing next Jan. Now getting from Adelaide to Niseko is pretty strait forward but in the process the business side of me has started wondering how the airline business benefits from certain inbuilt restrictions on their flight booking system. Obviously some restrictions are due to the airline being cheap eg Air Asia doesn’t connect segments for you, but in other cases it seems to just be irritating.
Some examples I can remember are
- QF’s multi city will only let you have two departures on one calendar day even though there are many combinations that would physically allow more than this.
- On QF when paying for flights you have to select your travel class ie (only search economy) rather than just have columns of multiple classes like when booking an award flight.
- JQ has a “multi city” function but you can only build in two segments ( what’s the point ?)
Basically it seems to me that there is a lot of information out there and for those of us that want the information it often isn’t made available to us and sometimes made harder to get. So my question is, to what point? How does an airline make more money but making it more difficult for me to book ? or at least see more options to book.
-A simple example might be rather than returning an error the system should show the flights that “I” know are physically happening and tell me they are booked/unavailable
Obviously this is the kind of thing that keeps travel agents in business. If this information does become accessible to the public does it blow open way more complexity and challenges that I am blissfully unaware of?
Of course I don’t want to take the challenge out of finding flights for those of you that enjoy it but it seems potentially pointlessly artificially restricted.
Some examples I can remember are
- QF’s multi city will only let you have two departures on one calendar day even though there are many combinations that would physically allow more than this.
- On QF when paying for flights you have to select your travel class ie (only search economy) rather than just have columns of multiple classes like when booking an award flight.
- JQ has a “multi city” function but you can only build in two segments ( what’s the point ?)
Basically it seems to me that there is a lot of information out there and for those of us that want the information it often isn’t made available to us and sometimes made harder to get. So my question is, to what point? How does an airline make more money but making it more difficult for me to book ? or at least see more options to book.
-A simple example might be rather than returning an error the system should show the flights that “I” know are physically happening and tell me they are booked/unavailable
Obviously this is the kind of thing that keeps travel agents in business. If this information does become accessible to the public does it blow open way more complexity and challenges that I am blissfully unaware of?
Of course I don’t want to take the challenge out of finding flights for those of you that enjoy it but it seems potentially pointlessly artificially restricted.
