$2 Coach Fares And $39 In First (Merged topics)

[FWAAA]

Why make the pax feel bad about this. They hunt for tickets and find cheap ones...they buy'um up. Those who are responsible for this operational glitch need to be let go. Plane and simple. This may cost $100s of million of dollars, fuel and real lost revenue.

Unfriggen believable again. Who else does this ever happen to but U?????

[post="262917"][/post]​

I agree. If you can't be trusted to run an airline website reliably, someone else should be found.

Who else? Couple years ago, BA sold a bunch of transatlantics in WT+ (extra legroom coach) for 20 pounds plus tax. Huge response on Flyertalk.

Didn't UAL sell a bunch of near-zero fares a few years ago?

 

[TheLarkAscending]

For the record I did NOT buy ticket one. I can't speak for others. I did what I thought was right I called a high level contact as soon as I found out.

SO THERE! College Boy!

[post="262921"][/post]​

Congratulations to you, Bob, for alerting someone on how to actually do their job properly as well as not taking advantage of the situation.

Let the "law school boy" alone. Everyone has to start as an embryo and work forward, and with any luck, they grow to adulthood. I do not understand why everyone pounces on this guy at every turn. So he is young, he appears to be studying to become something more than a slug or a drain on society, and he presents himself to be an aviation enthusiast, none of that adds up to a crime does it?

 

[TomBascom]

This may cost $100s of million of dollars, fuel and real lost revenue.

Don't you think that that is just a little over the top? Hundreds of millions of dollars?

From a PR point of view it's probably the best news (in the public eye) U has had in months.

(BTW -- I didn't buy any. And LEB is pretty close...)

 

[PITbull]

Tom,

I think you are forgeting the price of fuel to send one of these rockets in the sky when most of the folks paid $2.

 

[JayBrian]

Don't you think that that is just a little over the top? Hundreds of millions of dollars?

From a PR point of view it's probably the best news (in the public eye) U has had in months.

(BTW -- I didn't buy any. And LEB is pretty close...)

[post="262923"][/post]​

I hope US is able to get some positive publicity from this in some way.

 

[longing4piedmont]

I hope US is able to get some positive publicity from this in some way.

[post="262932"][/post]​

Well it just made Fox news.

 

[Schwanker]

Why make the pax feel bad about this. They hunt for tickets and find cheap ones...they buy'um up. Those who are responsible for this operational glitch need to be let go. Plane and simple. This may cost $100s of million of dollars, fuel and real lost revenue.

Unfriggen believable again. Who else does this ever happen to but U?????

[post="262917"][/post]​

HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS? Assuming a "normal" selling price is $300, the company would have to have sold 335 THOUSAND tickets at this price to equate $100M in losses. A more likely scenario: 1000 tickets X $300 would amount to a $300,000 loss. With the increased load factors, management will likely give themselves another $200,000 in bonuses resulting in a net loss of arount $500K.

 

[jcooke]

HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS? Assuming a "normal" selling price is $300, the company would have to have sold 335 THOUSAND tickets at this price to equate $100M in losses. A more likely scenario: 1000 tickets X $300 would amount to a $300,000 loss. With the increased load factors, management will likely give themselves another $200,000 in bonuses resulting in a net loss of arount $500K.

[post="262940"][/post]​

I smell a "US Airways Watch" thread coming up stating the POR will be delayed again due to the fare glitch... 😀

Anyways to keep it on topic, its definitely a revenue-negative move on US's part but the best thing they can do is save face and move on from this massive blunder. Just an unfortunate kick in the crotch on the way back up.

-JC

 

[jimntx]

This fiasco is typical of the reasons why I gave up my Information Technology consulting practice. The companies I was consulting with were scared to death that they might make their IT staff mad if they required them to do intensive testing--like we used to do in the "olden days" (i.e. way back in the 80's and early 90's). And, if they got mad, they might quit.

I had one 25 year old wonder tell me that a piece of software had no bugs. I asked him to show me his test runs. He informed me that he had no test runs. He had reviewed the code that he had written and there were no mistakes. Can you imagine my schadenfreude when I insisted that he demonstrate this marvelous piece of technological wizardry to the company president and it wouldn't even display the first screen! (He, of course, insisted there must be a hardware problem.) I later showed him where he had written an inescapable loop into the opening subroutine. 😛

 

[jimcfs]

This fiasco is typical of the reasons why I gave up my Information Technology consulting practice. The companies I was consulting with were scared to death that they might make their IT staff mad if they required them to do intensive testing--like we used to do in the "olden days" (i.e. way back in the 80's and early 90's). And, if they got mad, they might quit.

I had one 25 year old wonder tell me that a piece of software had no bugs. I asked him to show me his test runs. He informed me that he had no test runs. He had reviewed the code that he had written and there were no mistakes. Can you imagine my schadenfreude when I insisted that he demonstrate this marvelous piece of technological wizardry to the company president and it wouldn't even display the first screen! (He, of course, insisted there must be a hardware problem.) I later showed him where he had written an inescapable loop into the opening subroutine. 😛

[post="262948"][/post]​

Thank you... Thank you!! As one who teaches this stuff, it's refreshing to hear this. I have several hot shots who think they can code until they get to my upper level courses where they are expected to code and TEST their code by themselves... they soon find out the master can crash their code faster than one can say "$2 fare".

Today, corporate execs are in too big a hurry to get code running (translate this as get the latest/greatest thing on the web). So, you get nice looking websites that knock the socks off the corporate types that when push comes to shove don't work worth poopie. Anymore as a programmer, I'm paranoid if something goes out or gets used that isn't tested, retested and re-retested (is that a word?). I guess it's experience talking... but try telling that to a junior in college or a 25 year old junior coder. :blink:

 

[KCFlyer]

Don't you think that that is just a little over the top? Hundreds of millions of dollars?

From a PR point of view it's probably the best news (in the public eye) U has had in months.

(BTW -- I didn't buy any. And LEB is pretty close...)

[post="262923"][/post]​

And hey, the seat would have gone out empty anyway, so some revenue is better than no revenue, right?

 

[whlinder]

I agree. If you can't be trusted to run an airline website reliably, someone else should be found.

Who else? Couple years ago, BA sold a bunch of transatlantics in WT+ (extra legroom coach) for 20 pounds plus tax. Huge response on Flyertalk.

Didn't UAL sell a bunch of near-zero fares a few years ago?

[post="262918"][/post]​

It isn't about running a website properly, it is about loading fares properly. Same thing with BA $20.

This fiasco is typical of the reasons why I gave up my Information Technology consulting practice. The companies I was consulting with were scared to death that they might make their IT staff mad if they required them to do intensive testing--like we used to do in the "olden days" (i.e. way back in the 80's and early 90's). And, if they got mad, they might quit.

I had one 25 year old wonder tell me that a piece of software had no bugs. I asked him to show me his test runs. He informed me that he had no test runs. He had reviewed the code that he had written and there were no mistakes. Can you imagine my schadenfreude when I insisted that he demonstrate this marvelous piece of technological wizardry to the company president and it wouldn't even display the first screen! (He, of course, insisted there must be a hardware problem.) I later showed him where he had written an inescapable loop into the opening subroutine. 😛

[post="262948"][/post]​

Again, don't blame the software. All it takes is minimal effort from to user to simply look at a warning file. Had the person who put the fares out there simply looked at that file, they would have instantly seen what they did and fixed it. But they were too lazy, busy, mindless, whatever to bother to look at it. The software could probably be made more robust, more protective. But then it would be more difficult to get intentionally low fares out (such as companion flies free) into the system. Plus you've got extremely limited development resources with much bigger fish to fry, such as automating reissues, than to engineer the software to protect the 1 time every 5 years that the pricing analyst forgets to double check their work and it turns out to be significantly wrong.

 

[jcooke]

So what's the deal with the oh-so-hidden usairways.com? Either its going through some seriously needed testing (which I'm surprised hasn't gotten the cost-cutting axe) or its total fluff and they've got their one programmer working frantically to get it out by sometime next century.

Granted, IT's gotta have a part in the fare publishing but if you look into the job requirements for the Inventory guys they're looking for SQL and Excel experience. Looks like someone had an update query go awry and the "get more done faster with less" attitude had the fares push out w/o a safety check.

And jim, its not about needing to test the code, its having code taught so that the coder codes perfectly 🙂 Nah, QA testing is a must even if you are a genius.

-JC

 

[whlinder]

I promise you, the people who implement fare changes can have a high school degree and industry experience, and they will be trained on the system. I've known people who have gone to work for US to publish fares.

The 'safety check' will always run, they just simply have to remember to look at it and see what it says. I swear. It really is that simple.

 

[TomBascom]

And hey, the seat would have gone out empty anyway, so some revenue is better than no revenue, right?

[post="262954"][/post]​

Nice try but wrong. I'm glad to see that you're starting to grasp a glimmer of the concept though.

These weren't award seats -- so the "would have gone out empty anyway" argument probably doesn't apply to most of them. Although it would to some.

We can reasonably guess that a few hundred or a few thousand of these were sold. Of those seats some number were sold to people who would have flown those routes anyway and who just got lucky and got a good price. That's money "left on the table" but its probably small change -- I doubt there were 20 of those. And those people now have lots of very nice things to tell their friends about US Airways.

The rest of the tickets were bought by people that would not have purchased any ticket without this price. Some of those would indeed have been empty seats and they're a small loss -- the difference between the marginal cost of, IMHO, around $20 and the $2 paid. It isn't unheard of for fares like that to be offered, under properly controlled circumstances, as a "loss leader". So those don't bug me.

Total loss so far is maybe as high as $25k.

Of the rest some might be preventing sales of higher value tickets by depleting inventory improperly. But that's easily fixed -- bump people. Hand out RT vouchers. Real cost? Probably $25 each.

Ok, maybe we're up to $30k. Or call it $50k if you want to be crazy...

The big money losers are likely the UA code shares if there were any. But even that is unknown -- UA "gets the revenue" if the flight is on UA metal. But what revenue do they get? What US charged? Or some pre-set amount? If it's a pre-set amount and there are any significant number of these things fitting the bill (especially the F fares) then we could be looking at big bucks. But it takes a lot of time and effort to arrange that sort of routing. I don't think there could have been too many of them.

I doubt that it is hundreds of millions of dollars worth. It's probably actually not all that much. It would have been a lot more if it had run all weekend and the buzz had spread.