Comment by storyinmemo
2 years ago
But also, the hell with this. I'm still sour enough about the TSA without the concept of, "I'll buy tickets for me and three of my friends then see who wants to go," becoming impossible or gated by ticket transfer fees.
Airlines are preventing a secondary market. Unfavorable for your use case, but also prevents scalping airline tickets (while allowing airlines to attempt to maximize revenue). There are always tradeoffs and compromise.
To hack around this, I've used Southwest Airlines; I can buy tickets for folks and if they can't travel, we cancel the ticket(s) and keep the travel funds banked for another time. I hope this is potentially helpful information.
https://simpleflying.com/why-airlines-dont-allow-name-change...
except Southwest is easily the most expensive carrier these days and other carriers have also adopted flexibility
hopefully their new changes such as allowing their fares to be indexed will make them close to being competitive at some point. but today you really only get near-competitiveness (it's still bad) if you're going to check both pieces of luggage and have no way of getting free luggage on any other carrier.
even buying and throwing away tickets, depending on your probability of travel, might pay for itself in one trip.
People who compare Southwest to Frontier and Spirit are not serious people. Southwest is a premium offering, if folks want to ride cattle car a la carte, I encourage them to, just don't ruin the established brand of SWA. I would rather fly dead on Southwest than alive on another domestic carrier.
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I booked a flight a couple of weeks ago. Southwest was still cheaper than American and Delta for the flight I was looking for, even before thinking about two free checked bags. Adding in the fact their seats are bigger and free checked bags, it is definitely a better value to me.
Even allowing that but requiring your valid ID must be taken into the venue by yourself (or by your friends eg if you get sick and can't go) would be a big improvement, meaning ticket scalps would have to actually go or have someone on their team go along with every ticket they resell.