Standby Fares

[onemore]

Who remembers the days of the standby fare? How did they work and why were they abolished? Just curious.

 

[Forg]

I’ve not heard of (or maybe don’t remember) them ... judging by the name, assume they work like airline staff travel, where you register that you want to go somewhere on a particular day & then you only get really short notice for the next seat coming available? I know that with Qantas staff travel you basically have to be at the airport waiting for the next Qantas flight to have seats because they may only find out they have a free seat an hour before the ‘plane leaves, I’ve heard of people turning-up at FRA 3 days in a row before a flight home had a seat.
Not like the old days of staff travel where if there wasn’t a seat you instead sat on the fold-down jump-seat.

 

[onemore]

I seem to recall that it was passengers willing to wait at the airport and if there were some seats left they got them, I think there was a dedicated area for them to wait to see if they were lucky enough.

 

[Franky]

Pretty much was as stated above in the earlier days of Standby, though depending on the route and the day you could almost be certain of a seat. I was serving in Washington and on our return home in 1979, we flew via Europe. I had read up in the NYT about the ins and outs of flying standby, and worked out that leaving on a Tuesday from Dulles on Pan Am from memory, we could be fairly sure of the 4 seats required to get to London. The flight left around midday, and the checkins opened at 0900, so I drove out early to the airport and waited. There were no people in sight anywhere and eventually at 0900 on the dot a door opened and a bloke came out and opened up his booth. Not only was I able to get the 4 seats for US$65 each, he asked what movies I wanted to see, saying that each part of the 747 had different movies running, so I chose our seats accordingly. Went back to our hotel, collected the family, and returned in time to board for the flight in a not very full aircraft. Used the system a few more times, but never with the outcome on this particular flight.

 

[p--and--t]

I seem to recall that it was passengers willing to wait at the airport and if there were some seats left they got them, I think there was a dedicated area for them to wait to see if they were lucky enough.

Correct, for a period of time, can't recall exactly when, you could go to an Australian airport with your luggage and wait. At an appointed time during the boarding process of a domestic flight the airline would determine how many unsold seats and how many no-shows there were and offer the seats at 25% discount. Standby fares may have been limited to only capital cities, not really sure. I'm presuming predictive algorithms weren't so good then and they didn't practice overselling so there were a lot of empty seats moving around in the air.

Can't recall the details of the basis of the fare you were getting the discount from. If I remember correctly (could be wrong as all my fares were on the company) discounting wasn't so heavy during the duopoly and there weren't as many fare classes. Flexible fares were very high and 25% was a lot of money.

Some people would rock up before the first flight of the day and retry as each flight started boarding. Most people managed to get on a flight on the same day.

Edit: Some might also remember Mystery flights that were offered in that era. You would buy a really cheap ticket with no destination just a time to wait at the airport. Sometime in the next couple hours you would be put on a flight to "somewhere" for the day and on departure told what time to be back at the airport for the return flight. The airline would stick you on the next flight with empty seats and reserve you a seat on a return flight later in the day. For a very cheap fixed price (for some reason $59 and $99 sticks in my mind) you could have ended up from Adelaide in Alice Springs or Perth or Sydney etc for the day

 

[onemore]

Thanks, a relief to see my memory isn't playing tricks on me.