Who said airline fares were easy? With so many staff coming back from furlough Focus TMCs have that extra support of our Fares Desk which is run by our Fares Executive Laura Currie.
We asked Laura what a typical query for her is…
Yesterday I helped one of our Partners out with a multi-sector itinerary where the client had booked a comfort plus ticket and had flown outbound. The client wanted to change the return, which again was to be in comfort plus. The difficulty on this particular booking is knowing which classes are in comfort plus, as this isn’t a separate cabin but a slightly higher fare which offers more legroom and additional ancillaries.
Working out the new fare would be based on the flown fare outbound and calculating the new fare inbound, depending on new dates. This may seem straight forward but airlines file some fares using dual inventory, i.e. the booking class for example is S and the fare is calculated on lower inventory depending on what is available, which could be L, V etc. In addition, other rules will need to be checked, i.e. minimum stay, flight applications etc. and whether these have changed from the original ticket. Once all of that has been checked you need to recalculate the fare, after looking at the booking we had to recreate the journey, adding future date sectors for the flown outbound and the new return dates. The sectors were then priced and manipulated using command pricing and historical fares to ‘construct’ the new fare. The resulting fare was compared to the original fare displays to ensure the new fare was applicable on the original travel dates. Whilst the calculation can be time consuming it must be spot on to avoid getting an agent debit memo from the airline.