Why Flight Prices Look Rigged, Increased Venture Offer & the Best Premium Economy Seat Ever!

Shawn Coomer (0:00)

Airlines are penalizing you for one-ways, Emirates is changing the premium economy game, and how to add your AA number to an Alaska booking. All that and more coming up right now on MTM Travel.

Mark Ostermann (0:12)

I mean, why didn't they put a divider in premium economy years ago? It's so smart.

Shawn Coomer (0:23)

So happy Monday, Mark, and how was your weekend?

Mark Ostermann (0:27)

I mean, the Lions choked a little bit, but they still pulled it off. I don't know about, what was it? 29 unanswered for the Packards? Yikes.

Shawn Coomer (0:36)

I didn't get to watch the game other than I saw the score going as it went. I'm like, what's going on? What's going on? It felt so good. And then, yeah, they sucked. But what's new? They always come out bad in the beginning.

Mark Ostermann (0:47)

That's true. Except for last year, they trucked us the first game. But no, I was our buddy, Randy, texted me, he's like, Oh, man, that was like a roller coaster game. Were you getting all mad and stressed? I'm like, no, we were up like 21 points. And I just kind of like took a nap, passed out, woke up to overtime. I was like, what the heck happened? So I did a rewind and like fast forwarded through to watch like the main parts. I'm like, well, this is crap, but at least we pulled it out.

But yeah, I mean, NFL's back, football's back. It kind of gives you something to do on Saturdays and Sundays. So I'm excited for that.

Shawn Coomer (1:21)

Yeah, absolutely. It's fun to have football season back. But let's talk some of the miles and points topics we have. Starting with this tweet from Kyle Potter saying, tons of examples of one-way penalties from countless airports and airlines.

And so it's going back one-way penalty. Everybody used to book round trip, right? You didn't used to be able to book one way for half the price or single segments would always penalize you if you didn't do round trips. And then in came the low-cost carriers with their per segment pricing. And that really did change the biggies to price differently. And so many times you could do one ways. And that is, I mean, that's beneficial. We know that on the award side often, you know, you can do that, but you can go in and out of different airports, be more flexible, different airlines. There's all kinds of reasons not to book a round trip. Not to mention the fact if something goes wrong with one ticket, the other one's not affected all of that. But he is showing through a lot of these examples that they are penalizing customers now for not doing round trips.

And this isn't good. This is terrible.

Mark Ostermann (2:19)

Yeah, we talked about how booking round trip kind of screwed me on my trip to Thailand and Singapore a couple of years ago because my flight got canceled going out and I had a connection that I had booked to get from Singapore to Bangkok and then Bangkok back to Singapore. And I booked round trip flight and then that got canceled. The flight to from JFK to Singapore got canceled. So I was going to miss that first connecting flight. And they're like, oh, there's nothing we can do. If you miss it, you just have to cancel the whole thing. Well, the problem was the flight that I had booked from Bangkok back to Singapore to get home and spend a couple of days there, it was no longer available as an award. So I couldn't rebook that. I had to pay cash and it cost me like $300 or $400 and it was kind of a mess. And if I had booked them as each one ways, then it wouldn't matter. Like I could just cancel the one flight that I'm going to miss and still kept that other one. So there are a lot of perks, especially for people like this. Or maybe you find like a better flight to go out or to come home and you want to change that, but keep the original other leg and you can't do that if it's a round trip booking.

So it was cool that you could do this and now it's annoying if it's going to cost you like double or you know, several hundred dollars more, more points, whatever it be. That's just, I think that's wrong.

Shawn Coomer (3:35)

It can happen on awards too. So it's something to be looking at. And I guess, you know, if you see a really high one way, check the round trip and see, I wonder, I was thinking about this with the changes of Southwest as an airline, just everything that they're going through and the loss of spirit. I do wonder if this has made them kind of feel like they can do this again. Whereas before they were competing so hard on that one way price, and maybe they aren't anymore.