ATA closure affects Vegas

Hawaiians love to travel to Vegas. I regularly see them when I visit the downtown area. They are so personable and very cool to hang out with overall. The latest news about airline closures affects how they get to Vegas. From the Las Vegas Sun

The announcement today that ATA Airlines has shut down after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection severs another conduit for passengers between Las Vegas and Honolulu.

The Indianapolis-based airline – a code-share partner with Southwest Airlines, the busiest carrier at McCarran International Airport – had only one daily flight to and from Las Vegas.

But that flight was one of three daily nonstop round trips between Las Vegas and Hawaii’s largest city and capital, Honolulu.

Southwest’s code-share agreement enabled customers to book travel on Southwest to several ATA destinations. McCarran was one of four airports Southwest used to transfer customers and baggage through an agreement the airlines had since February 2005.

When booking flights with smaller carriers, check to see if they had a code-share agreement: a larger airline who will back them if something happens. Without an agreement, this happens (from Yahoo, bolding by me):

Airlines have a new attitude toward customers of failed carriers: It's your loss, not ours. With more airlines folding these days, the impact on consumers can be severe.

Passenger carriers are no longer required to honor tickets of failed competitors because Congress let a government protection for travelers expire in 2006. So when Aloha Airgroup Inc., ATA Airlines Inc. and Skybus Airlines Inc. all shut down last week, some airlines, including the nation's two biggest, refused to accept stranded ticket-holders.

That is a big change for consumers. They used to be able to buy tickets on struggling airlines with reasonable expectations that either the airline would keep flying if it went bankrupt, or other airlines would honor tickets for a small fee. Now, consumers need to be far more careful in picking airlines, especially for tickets bought months in advance.

Aloha Airlines also went Chapter 11, but will keep flying. They have a one-stop flight between Vegas and Hawaii.

No codeshare means you might have to pay an ungodly amount of money to get back home if you are stranded far from home. Back to the Yahoo article:

The carriers said they did offer tickets at discounted prices rather than full-fare, last-minute purchase prices. United said it offered a one-way fare of $275 from Honolulu or Maui to Los Angeles with no advance-purchase requirements, for example, and $475 from Honolulu to Chicago. American said it waived advance-purchase requirements so Aloha, ATA and Skybus ticket-holders could get discounted inventory if available.

But the reality is that at least some customers paid very steep prices. The Maui News reported several customers at Maui's airport said they had to pay $900 each for one-way tickets from Maui to Los Angeles on American. A spokesman for American, , says it is possible there was no advance-purchase inventory left when those customers called.

The kicker comes in the Yahoo article:

"We didn't have a code-share relationship of any kind with any of these airlines, so anything we do to offer people a discount is basically out of the 'goodness of our hearts,'" Mr. Wagner said. "Any discount we give is revenue lost, and we won't be getting anything out of their bankruptcies. So in a $100-a-barrel oil environment, anything that any airline does is generous."

Un-Be-lieve-able. Bad service, lost luggage, late flights, risk of being stranded, cramped seats, etc. Acting out of the goodness of their hearts might start improving their PR image around the country.

Increasingly, flying is becoming buyer beware.

(Disclosure: I flew to Savannah this weekend and the worse part was flying there and back. More on that later)