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New Lingo
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Old Lingo
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I’ve recently realized that by claiming I find “glitches in airline algorithms” – you might think I’m doing something unethical, or somehow exploiting mistakes airlines make.
For the record, I believe “mistake fares” are so rare, you’d be better off buying lottery tickets, and I don’t waste my time finding those.
“Glitch fares” “No-cancel fares” are fully intentional. The “glitch” is solely from the fact that the airlines haven’t sold enough seats at a certain point in time and they need to do something drastic to sell more seats. A lot of people in the “travel for cheap” industry call them mistake fares, and I definitely don’t like that phrase because I think you’d be better off buying lottery tickets than holding your breath on the few actual mistakes airlines make in pricing their flights.
Rather than trying to continue to justify my use of “Glitch fares” I’m thinking about a new term: “No-Cancel Fares.” Here is my explanation about how the “No-Cancel” fares I find happen:
- Airlines schedule most flights up to a year in advance.
- 8 or 9 months out, if they have at least a few seats booked, but not at least, say, 15%, they drop a handful of seats to get to 15%. If they don’t fill those seats within a few days, they cancel the flight and re-schedule or refund existing bookings.
- They do the same thing at random intervals 6 months out, 4 months out, 2 weeks out, 3 days out, etc.
How much are these price drops? I don’t know, and I don’t care. When it’s an insignificant amount, it is no different than the 99.9% of flights I ignore, and you can find them on Tavelocity, Kayak, Priceline, etc. When it’s a significant amount… Those represent about 70% of the deals I share with my subscribers.
The other 20% of deals I find are hotel glitches (and yes – those are package discount glitches the OTAs make – and I exploit the hell out of those. About 10% of the deals I find are actual airline sales.
Make no mistake; These are NOT airline sales that get widely advertised. If airlines publicly advertised 2 to 6 seats being practically given away, that would piss too many people off. (“Sorry – those seats sold out 6 minutes after we advertised it.”) For what it’s worth, that’s actually the same reason 90% of the time I find those deals, I only share them with my premium subscribers.
So don’t feel guilty about “taking advantage” of an airline mistake. The only “glitch” is that the airlines haven’t sold enough seats yet.
It’s quite the opposite. By buying a glitch fare no-cancel fare – you are helping the airline by not having to cancel the flight, spend tens of thousands of dollars in resources re-scheduling (or refunding) passengers & re-scheduling crew and pay for crew lodging.
PS – Admittedly – I’ve never worked a day in the airline industry. The above is purely a hypothesis from a numbers guy explaining how he finds good deals online. I realize there are about 500 other moving parts to the actual algorithm, but I know a thing or two about algorithms & arbitrage, so I’m giving myself license to make a few assumptions.
If you worked for United for 25 years and disagree with my theory on why the prices I find every day exist, you are welcome to unsubscribe from my updates. The “unsubscribe” link is at the bottom of every email I send.
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