‘Secret fares,’ mobile apps will soon change the way you fly
Search for a flight on Expedia or Priceline and you’ll likely see an “opaque” fare: a price, but no carrier or even the exact time. How does this help you, one may ask? Well it’s not meant to help you — it’s meant to help the airlines.
These mysterious fares are a tool that can help carriers move seats they have a hard time selling. This strategy is turning even more complex with “secret fares,” the next evolution in the airline quest to more tightly control ticketing inventory, and the costs imposed by companies that distribute their fares. It even involves an app.
On Wednesday, the mobile-only travel seller Hopper began offering these “secret fares” from a half dozen airlines, including Air Canada, at prices that could be as much as 35 percent below what the same carriers publish elsewhere. The initial 60,000 routes covered will be international, and mostly long-haul. The minimum discount is 5 percent below fares offered with full details elsewhere, according to Hopper. Air China, Panama’s Copa Holdings, Chile’s LATAM Airlines, Turkish Airlines and WestJet Airlines are the other carriers participating in Hopper’s secret offerings.
“This is the first time in years that these airlines have actually allowed someone” to offer fares lower than what they offer publicly, said Dakota Smith, Hopper’s head of growth and business. “Because we’re mobile-only and don’t have a website, airlines are not seeing us as direct competition to their web fares.”
Montreal-based Hopper plans to add another six airlines in coming weeks and predicts that the U.S. Big Four (American, United, Delta, Southwest) will be interested because of the “closed” selling environment, one that’s invisible to online search engines such as Alphabet’s Google and Baidu. They “can’t scrape our web site to see what we’re doing,” Smith said. “You also can’t link to these fares.”
Carriers the world over are keen to differentiate themselves, and the experience of flying with them, from rivals. This is part of an industrywide move to train travelers to assess their flights on attributes beyond price, which has long been the key criterion for consumers when deciding which airline to fly. Customers who select a secret price may find themselves on an airline they never considered before. Who knows? They may like it.
These obscured fares also point to a day when airlines will be better able to dynamically price tickets. Right now, carriers load their fares several times a day into a central clearinghouse, which then publishes them across global distribution platforms such as Sabre, Travelport Worldwide and Amadeus IT group.
Airlines have battled these companies for years over costs.