“Seamless” travel? Here’s the reality of codeshare flights
The new three-way codeshare agreement between American Airlines, British Airways and Iberia is being touted as a “benefit to consumers” that will offer “easy, seamless and convenient travel to more global destinations.”
Yeah, right.
The airlines hope to co-operate commercially on flights between the United States, Mexico, Canada, the European Union, Switzerland and Norway, continue to operate as separate legal entities, and expand their codeshare agreements on flights within and beyond the EU and US, they say.
But just how seamless are codeshare flights?
Here’s an existing example. If you fly from Austin, Texas to Madrid, you can book a ticket on all British Airways flights. But in reality, you fly on American Airlines from Austin to Dallas, change terminals in Dallas to a true British Airways flight, then change terminals again in London to an Iberia flight.
Sure, it’s a single fare, but you, and your luggage, have to make those transitions. And from years in the travel business, I can tell you that should something go wrong, airline finger-pointing supersedes alliance hype almost every time.
Plus, while having a ticket with alliance carriers helps, it’s just not the same as having a connection on the same carrier.
Let me give you two recent examples. A client of mine was on a Lufthansa-United joint business class electronic ticket to Athens, with a connection in Frankfurt. On the way out, the only problem was Lufthansa not crediting his mileage on the connecting flight. But on the way back, a United agent in Frankfurt demanded his paper ticket.
Because he was a United VIP, a supervisor finally let him on the plane at the last minute. Otherwise he would have missed it. And there was nothing wrong with the ticket. In fact, when he made it home, his return ticket showed both valid, and unused.
Another client had a worse result earlier this year with Air France and Northwest/KLM, both SkyTeam members. She was booked to fly Kiev-Amsterdam-San Francisco. The day before her flight, KLM canceled its flight out of Kiev, and sent us a message, which I forwarded to her, that she was rebooked on Air France via Paris, and that Air France would accept the electronic ticket.
They didn’t.
The KLM agent had no record of the new flight, and Air France, though they showed a reservation, rudely asked why she had shown up without a ticket, and sent her home. She contacted our office later to see if we could at least get a refund, although after a few hours on the phone Northwest/KLM did agree to let her fly the next day. (And eventually sent her a $100.00 apology certificate, albeit valid online only.)
Improved technology should improve the e-ticket situation overall, and these alliances may indeed get smoother with time. But given a choice between a single airline connection, and a code-share connection, well, there’s still no real choice.
And all the joint business agreements in the world probably won’t change that.
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4 Responses to ““Seamless” travel? Here’s the reality of codeshare flights”
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Codeshare flights are not good for the customer. They allow the airlines not to provide service and not take responsibility for their lack of action. All the airlines do when a codeshare flight is involved, is point fingers blaming everyone else and refusing to offer to help solve the problem.
Good customer service would mean that the “partners” would put aside the blame game and instead step up and say “What do we need to do to fix this problem?”. That’s would be good customer service and live up to the hype but the reality is that they, the airlines, don’t know and don’t want to provide good customer service.
In my humble opinion, the US Congress should revoke all the anti-trust immunity deals given to the airlines and thus end the practice of codesharing.
The problems encountered in both examples in the brief article actually have nothing to do with a codeshare arrangement and could have happened if the passengers were flying on a single airline. I fly frequently on AA codeshare flights with BA and have never had a problem. My one bit of advice to anyone taking a trip involving multiple flight segments is to spend one or two minutes when booking to see if the flight segments are on one airline or with a codeshare partner. If some of the segments are codeshare, I always determine the information, policies and flight numbers of the codeshare airline and keep that information with me while I travel. When flights are booked online, the flight information always includes a codeshare if that is a case, so it is simple to figure this out ahead of time.
I have found it invaluable to have the eTicket number for checking in. Many people think that cute Sabre six digit alphanumeric is all they need. Unfortunately, this is not the case. If any change has been made to the itinerary, the passenger absolutely must have the 13+ digit electronic ticket number. This ticket number seems to be able to unlock the wonders of the airline ticketing system.
I never go to the airport without my printed itinerary (with eTicket number), passport and my travel agent’s 24/7 telephone number programmed into my fully charged cell phone.
Hi Allison, I agree that a single airline can mess things up too…but in our office our experience is that multiple airline itineraries are much more likely to have problems. I have had many many more examples of electronic ticket problems and baggage problems with code-shares, besides the issues of often having to switch terminals. And I didn’t even get into when schedule changes result in mis-connected flights, which means you need to change a flight on airline B because of airline A. It can take hours to straighten out. Plus one airline partner almost always blames the other- Biritish Airways and Iberia both told a client of mine recently it was the other airlines fault - she finally got her luggage 3 weeks later.
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Plus in the event of a delay, an airline is more likely to hold a plane for an online connection than a code-share connection. I’m glad you’ve had good luck, and in some cases there is no alternative. But if code-shares and online connection were the same, we would have a lot less stress in the travel industry.