There are approximately 45,000 flights every day in the U.S., all of them filled with people heading off to adventure, relaxation, or business. If you were one of them at any time recently, there’s a very good chance you booked your tickets online, possibly by going directly to an airline’s website. And after buying those tickets, you probably relied on the airline’s website for real-time updates about your flight—and that means you have to be able to trust the information on an airline’s website and trust that the airline is being above board with you regarding pricing, seat availability, and everything else to do with your desired flight. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case. Here are some of the ways your airline’s website is built to deceive you.
Fake customers
If you’ve ever spent some time on an airline’s website or a booking site, playing with dates, seat choices, and other logistics, you’ve probably seen a little graphic showing you that X number of people are looking at those tickets. The implication being that several dozen (or more) folks are also sitting at their computers or on their phones, about to click BUY and steal those tickets out from under you.
This is an example of “social proof,” a technique used in sales that leverages our desire for communal validation to push us to buy something. Seeing that all those invisible strangers are mulling those plane tickets makes the decision seem valid and correct—why else would so many other people be considering pulling the trigger on that purchase? But there’s no way to know if there are actually dozens or hundreds of people looking at those precise tickets or if it’s a randomly generated number or a vague approximation. Either way, it’s there just to pressure you into buying.
Deceptive scarcity
Another way airline and booking sites lie to you is with deceptive language around scarcity. If you’ve ever put together an itinerary and the sites tells you that there are only two seats left, so you’d better get a move on, you might reasonably assume that this means only two sets left on that flight, and you’ll be scrambling to find a different flight unless you decide immediately (this is often combined with a timer counting down the minutes that you can hold those tickets and deliberate. Combined with the constant fluctuation of ticket prices as the plane capacity and demand change, this can push you to click BUY before you’ve completely thought it through.
But what that language often actually means is that there are two seats left … at that price. That’s useful information, of course, but omitting the pricing aspect changes the stakes. There’s a huge difference between having to pay a little more and not being able to book the flight at all.
What do you think so far?
Check-in fees
You might assume that if you want to check in for your flight in-person at the airport, or have a printed boarding pass instead of a code displayed on your phone, that it’s no big deal. But many budget airlines will charge you a fee for that—and it’s usually not made clear on their website. There is often also a fee if you don’t check in online early enough, usually at least two hours before your flight, and those fees are also typically buried in FAQs and fine print instead of clearly displayed, so don’t assume you’ve got flexibility there.
Convenient weather
It’s smart to track your flights as your departure day approaches, right up until you need to leave for the airport. Better to know that your flight is going to be delayed before you’re trapped in an airport for hours. But unexpected delays can have a ripple effect on the rest of your travel plans, so when a flight is delayed and you have to spend extra money to rebook other aspects of your trip, you might want to ask for some compensation. After all, it wasn’t your fault the plane or flight crew wasn’t there when they were supposed to be.
Ah, but then the airline website informs you that the flight was delayed due to weather, and since weather is outside the airline’s control, you’re not entitled to any kind of compensation. Weather delays are very common excuses for airlines—but Federal Aviation Administration data shows that weather delays account for just a tick more than 1% of flight delays, so the chances that the airline is using weather as an excuse to not deal with your compensation claims are actually pretty good.
