Archive for airfares
TAM’s Brazil Airpass
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Tam has just announced the 2009 edition of its Brazil Airpass and also of its South America Airpass.
The Brazil Airpass uses vouchers. Each voucher corresponds to a flight in economy class. You can buy from 1 to 9 vouchers (from 1 to 4 vouchers the price is the same). When you buy the vouchers, you have to specify which of the four reserve classes (not to be confused with the service classes, more information in airfare terminology) you want. The more expensive the class reserve the likelier you are to find seats available.
The airpass must be purchased and issued abroad (you can’t just arrive in Brazil and try to buy it here). It must be purchased along with an international ticket to Brazil.
If you arrive in Brazil with an international flight operated by Tam or Tam Airlines (former Tam Mercosul) you will pay slightly less for the airpass. Depending on the reserve class, the airpass will cost you between USD 551 to USD842 (for 1 to 4 vouchers) and USD 1241 to USD 2001 (9 vouchers). If you arrive in Brazil with a company that has an interline agreement with Tam or on a code share flight, the pass will cost between USD 635 to USD 926 (for 1 to 4 vouchers) to USD 1511 and USD 2201 (9 vouchers).
You have 30 days to use all the vouchers, counting from the day of your first flight.
The luggage allowance for the internal flights equals that of the international flight that brough you to Brazil.
There is a fee of USD 100 for cancellation or if you want to change the dates. Once issued, you cannot change the routes. There’s a another series of rules you should be familiar with before you approach your travel agent or Tam to purchase the airpass.
Airpasses can be bought up to 31 December 2009 for flights before 10 July 2010. For those taking part in Tam’s frequent flyer program (Fidelidade Tam), flights earn you 90% of the total amount of points.
Although it is called Brazil Airpass, you can include on your route flights to Ciudad del Este in Paraguay.
Is it worth it?
It depends on the time of the year you intend to travel, on the distances you are going to fly, the domestic market at the time (whether there are enticing flight deals or not) and of the time you have to complete your trip (under 30 days). There are so many things to consider that it is very difficult to answer the question. The consumers need to assess their trip, compare prices and work out whether it pays or not.
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TAM’s South America Airpass
code share
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You’ll often read the term code share here at the blog. What does it mean? Code share agreements are signed by two or more airlines with the aim of offering a greater number of destinations to their customers while not having to physically fly to those destinations.
How do they do it? When it enters a code share agreement, airline A, interested in taking its customers to a destination she doesn’t fly to, purchases a number of tickets from airline B, and resells them as their own. It has the right of using its own flight number (parallel to the one used by airline B, the one operating the flight).
In practice, a passenger from airline A buy a ticket with an airline A flight number (beginning with numbers other than the ones used by the airline for its own flights) but ends up flying with airline B.
Both airlines benefit from the agreement. Airline A is capable of offering more destinations to its clients without the need of using its own aircraft to transport a reduced number of clients that would make the flight uneconomical. Airline B increases the occupation of its own flights with passengers from airline A.
The consumer wins in so far as it includes his entire itinerary in just the one ticket. They can also acumulate miles on its own airline’s program and checks in their baggage to their final destination. But the customer might end up losing if the service offered by the airline operating the flight is inferior to the one offered by the company that sold him the ticket.
All the big airlines have code share agreements. And in the context of alliances, code share agreements are the rule among the companies forming an alliance.
ITA, a limited GDS anyone can use
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We’ve already seen at what is a GDS? what a Global Distribution System is. At that entry we mentioned that only travel agents and other professionals of the tourism sector can access GDSs to search for, book and purchase tickets.
Today we want to introduce you to ITA, a GDS developed by ITA Software and used by some aggregators like the American Orbitz, as well as by some airlines. With ITA you won’t be able to book or purchase tickets but, unlike the other GDSs, you have limited access to some of the date held at the system. You can do some simple fare checks and power users will be able to carry out more detailed searches. Fares are presented in a very clear fashion and the user gets access to the fare code, its rules and taxes.
Go to the ITA homepage. Out of the four options available on the middle of the screen, click on Search Fares Using QPX.
On the next screen, check Log in as Guest.
On the initial search page, at the top of the page, you can search for flights on specific dates (day more, day less), perform a weekend search, or the cheapest fares during a 30-day period at month-long search. For each search you can choose One Way, Round Trip or Multi-Segment.
To select the departure airport and your destination you have to use the codes for the airports you want to use (in case you need it, at World Airport Codes we explained how to search for airport codes).
If you are using the system from outside the US you need to specify where the tickets will be issued, so the fares and taxes appear on your local currency (and fares not available on your region are eliminated from the search results ). You need to identify your current location at Sales City.
The results appear on a new page. At the top of the page, a summary of the different airfares.
At the bottom of the page, the results from the cheapest to the most expensive. As well as the airfare (including taxes and supplements), the bottom of the page contains information on stopovers, dates, duration of the flight, as well as warnings when you need to change airports or when a stopover is quite long.
If you click on Details you will access a new page with the description of the flights.
The option Show Booking Details on the left-hand side allows you to view all the taxes, supplements and codes of the fare you have selected. The option Rules, appearing now right next to each fare, allows you to view all the rules and restrictions of the fare you have selected.
You can search on a specific airline or on several of them; search for direct flights; search for a specific booking codes. For more advanced searches you need to be conversant with the language used by the virtual search engine – language described at the Help section on the initial search page.
ITA won’t allow you to book or buy the airfares you find, but because the search results give the full details of the fare, the route and the flights used, you only need to send the result to a travel agent with GDS access for them to locate the fare for you. ITA allows you to send your search results by email (choose E-mail this itinerary at the top of the page).
ITA is a hell of a search engine but, as you will probably be aware by now, you need some basic training to be able to use it. Try it out, if you are used to searching fares on the Internet, you are going to love it.
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RELATED POSTS:
what is a GDS
what is an aggregator
what is a consolidator
airfare terminology
links: Kayak
Posted by: | CommentsKayak is one of the most useful international aggregators around.
On its home page you can fill the spaces with your dates, origin and destination to search for a flight. On the results page you will find the airfares the system has found along with links to the airline’s websites or consolidator’s pages where the fares were found.
The option Buzz takes you to a very useful page, where you can define a city or airport and carry out an extensive search, or a search limited to regions of the world, times of the year or cost. This tool uses information gathered from similar searches done on the system by other users of Kayak. For that reason, there is more data on the most popular routes.
You can register for free and do searches with flexible dates. You can also subscribe to Fare Alert and receive notifications every time the fares for a given route fall in price.
Excellent as it may be, we do not advice you to solely rely on this website as your source of information. It is essential you always visit the airlines’ own websites for they often have exclusive promotions Kayak and other consolidators and aggregators have no access too (that is the case, for instance, with Brazilian airline GOL).
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RELATED POSTS:
what is an aggregator?
what is a consolidator?
VARIG, now available at GOL’s website
Posted by: | CommentsFrom now on, customers entering Gol’s website might end up buying Varig’s tickets.
After the merger between Gol and Varig was authorized, both companies adopted the legal identity of VRG linhas aéreas (the controller of the new Varig). The companies began to fly with Varig’s official authorization. For that reason, Gol and Varig are now brands of VRG linhas aéreas.
Former VRG flights operated by Varig had a RG code in front of the flight number. Gol’s code was G3. Now all flights, both Gol’s and Varig’s, will use the G3 code before the flight number.
How can I tell whether I’ll be flying Gol or Varig? If your flight number begins with 1 or 7, you will be boarding a Gol aircraft; if it begins with 2 or 8, it will be a Varig airplane – (numbers 7 and 8 are usually reserved for international routes). We feel in the future there will be little difference between flying Gol or Varig.
On the next screenshot you can see how the flight (vôo) to Fernando de Noronha, that can now be purchased through GOL’s website, is operated by Varig (the flight number begins with 2).
Varig languishes a bit more; its website is no more than a simple accessory to Gol’s own website.
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Original text in Portuguese: Varig: Agora Também no Site da Gol
En español: VARIG, ahora también en la página de la GOL
what is a consolidator?
Posted by: | CommentsA consolidator is, basically, a virtual travel agent that sells tickets from several airlines. Consolidators get discounted prices from the airlines because they buy in bulk from them.
As we explained when we mentioned aggregators, you are advised to complete your search through a consolidator with a visit to the airline’s own website. Often the airlines run promotions you can only access through their own sites. We also recommend checking the websites of other airliners flying the route you are interested in. Exclusive promotions at the airline’s websites are increasingly more frequent.
The consolidator is one of the stops we have to make on our search for the best airfare; it cannot be neither our most important stop nor the final stop in our quest.
Some very well known consolidators (we will certainly mention them at D Airfares) are Travelocity and Expedia.
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RELATED POSTS:
what is a GDS?
what is an aggregator?
what is an aggregator?
Posted by: | CommentsAggregators are websites that search on consolidators for the best possible airfares, based on the details provided by the user performing the search. Aggregators don’t sell tickets, consolidators do. The usefulness of aggregators lies in the fact that they search simultaneously on several consolidators and also on the airlines websites.
Aggregators save an awful lot of time, but they should never replace the compulsory visit to the airline’s website for the flight you are searching for. The reason being that some promotions have fixed rules regarding dates or number of passengers. Those rules are not available to the aggregator. Also, some fares are exclusively available for tickets sold through the airline’s own website. That’s why sometimes your travel agent won’t be able to find a specific promotion through the agency’s GDS.
There are few very well-known aggregators, such as Booking Buddy, Kayak or FareCompare. We will refer to them in future posts here at D AIRFARE.
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what is a GDS?
what is a consolidator?
what is a GDS?
Posted by: | CommentsHere in D Airfare we will often mention the term GDS (Global Distribution System).
GDSs are large companies with sophisticated computing systems. Their computing networks supply real-time information on airfares, tickets and reservations from the airlines the GDSs have distribution agreements with. GDSs customers can access the systems and check, book and purchase tickets.
GDSs do not sell to the end consumer. Its clients are other companies that do have the travellers as their end client. GDSs are, therefore, intermediaries between the airlines and the agencies that sell tickets to the consumers. GDSs make their profit from the commissions they charge airlines and/or customers.
There are several GDS. The best known are Amadeus and Sabre. Each one has their own followers and critics, and although they often work with similar fares, the end price they charge is not always identical.
The relationship between airlines and GDS has known better times. Lately, airlines have invested on the development of their own websites, to reduce their dependency from GDSs. The problem is that GDSs can still do things a single airline cannot, such as combining tariffs from different airlines to issue a ticket.
Some companies have created additional taxes for tickets issued through certain GDSs, in an attempt to favour their own websites or GDSs with which they have more favourable agreements.
The truth is that GDSs have become very lucrative businesses and the airlines have become quite dependent on them. Today GDSs book and sell, not only airline tickets, but car rental packages and hotel rooms.
To access a GDS you need to have a commercial agreement with its operator. Travel agents pay to access GDSs, although depending on the amount of business they conduct, they can get discounts or the use of the service for free.
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RELATED POSTS:
what is an aggregator?
what is a consolidator?
airfare terminology
Posted by: | CommentsThis post is an attempt to explain in lay terms some of the terminology surrounding airfares and tickets.
BOOKING CLASS o BOOKING CODE
The seats on a plane are divided according to different fare levels. The amount reserved for each fare level depends on factors such as the time of the day, whether it’s high or low season, the demand for business tickets, the route, and so on. It is important not to mistake the service class (economy, business, first) for the booking class. The same service class can include several different booking classes.
The complete fare code is composed by a series of numbers and letters, for instance, VLXPX3MB. The first letter, in our example letter V, identifies the booking class which in turns determines the price of the fare. The rest of the code identifies a specific number of rules (LXPX3MB). The same set of rules can be shared by different fares, for instance VLXPX3MB, LLXPX3MB, QLXPX3MB. Usually the booking classes associated to the cheapest tickets are the first ones to be sold.
Which is the booking code associated to the lowest fares? It depends, each airline has its own set of letters representing booking codes. Generally speaking, letters Y, C and F are associated to the full fares (most expensive) of the economy, business and first classes.
Booking codes explain why two passengers on the same flight, sitting side by side, might have paid different amounts of money for a similar ticket.
CIRCLE TRIP
When you leave from an airport and do several stopovers on the way. The final stopover takes you back to your point of departure. You go from A to B, from B to C and from C back to A. B and C are stopovers (and not connections).
DIRECT
A flight between two points that mantains the same flight number. You do not have to re-check your baggage in or obtain a new boarding card. There might be one or more stops on the way. You might even have to change planes. It is not the same as a nonstop flight.
DOUBLE OPEN JAW
When the initial and the final airports are different. You go from A to B and return from C to D. The journey between B to C and D to A (if necessary) is the passenger’s responsibility.
END TO END
Combination of two rounds trips to form a full itinerary. The first round trip, from A to B and from B to A. The second, from B to C and from C to B. It is used as follows: first the outward journey of the first ticket (A to B); then the second ticket (B to C and C to B) and then the return journey of the first ticket (B to A). It can be useful to combine two promotional fares for as long as they allow end to end.
HALF ROUND TRIP BASIS
The price of a circle trip is half the cost of the sum of its round trips. The cost of A to B, B to C and C to A (A-B-C-A) is half of the cost of the following round trips: A to B and B to A (A-B-A), B to C and C to B (B-C-B) and C to A and A to C (C-A-C).
NONSTOP
A direct flight between two points with no intermediate stops.
ONE WAY
One-way trip. You can use two one way trips to form a round trip. Usually the fare for a one-way trip is much more expensive than half of the value of a return trip. The exception are low-cost airlines that often sell only one-way tickets.
OPEN JAW
When on a return ticket the outward flight ends on a different airport from the departing airport for the return flight. You fly from A to B and from C to A. The journey between B and C is your responsibility.
REFUND
It refers to the value to be refunded to the passenger in case he decides to cancel it. Sometimes there is no refund at all; instead, you can use the amount you paid to buy a new ticket. If you cancel this new ticket, there will not be a refund.
REROUTING
Changes to your itinerary (day, time, destination). The rules are different whether you make the changes before or after your first flight. If you do it before flying, you might have to cancel the ticket and issue a new one. When the trip has started, you can only change dates and times, but not the destinations.
ROUND TRIP
A round-trip ticket.
STAND BY
It allows the passenger to stand by the departure gate, minutes before the flight is due to leave, in the hope a seat will become available. It is different from wait list.
STOPOVER
Stopovers are intermediate stops or connections, lasting for most than 4 hours on domestic flights and more than 24 hours on international flights. However, if you reach an airport on the last flight available that day and embark on the first flight the day after, you will be on connection and not a stopover.
WAITLIST
A list where the passenger’s name is kept waiting for an airfare to appear on the system as available. Someone else might have booked a ticket but end up not buying it; his booking returns to the system to be sold again. Not the same as standby.