Business: Help for Full Fares

Airlines try to end discontent over discounts

During the mad, magnificent peak travel season of '78, commercial flying finally became a mass transit business. Drawn by all the bargain fares, hordes of vacationers—retired couples, hirsute backpackers, whole families loaded down with bikes, fold-up baby strollers and other paraphernalia —swarmed into the nation's airports and almost overnight cured the airlines' lingering problem of too many empty seats. While it was a boon to the industry, whose planes have been setting records in passenger loadings (63% of capacity) and earnings (expected to be about $1 billion this year), the summer of the discounts was also a season of horrendous delays and deep discontent for the carriers' staple customer, the crowd-weary, briefcase-toting business man or woman. As one American Airlines executive described the universal gripe: "They told us that they were disappointed, and that they weren't being treated as well as they should be."

Some airlines are moving to deal with a particular peeve of the full-fare flyer: that once he or she managed to get a reservation and to elbow on board a crowded plane, chances were that the passenger sitting in the next seat and getting the same service had paid only a fraction as much. Indeed, in August, travelers on bargain tickets accounted for precisely 56.3% of the seats sold by the airlines, compared with 44.8% the year before. Trying to appease this irritated full-fare minority, American, Pan Am, TWA and British Airways have announced new sections in coach that are designed especially to assure business travelers that, as an American ad says, "you get what you pay for." Following similar three-class plans put in earlier by Continental Airlines and British Caledonian, these airlines will maintain their existing first-class sections but separate the rest of the cabin into two areas: one for full-fare coach passengers, the other in the rear, for the cut-rate folk.

There will be no dividing bulkhead; the boundary will be movable and marked in much the same way that no-smoking areas are now defined. In the cheaper section, seats will usually all be filled, drink and food service will be last and the menu may be more limited. Whatever empty seats there are will all be in the full-fare section so that passengers there can spread out their possessions or stretch out for a nap. On transatlantic flights full-fare passengers will also get an unlimited number of free drinks, as well as free movie headsets. Other airlines are courting these bread-and-butter customers in different ways. Some are trying to attract more of them into first class by cutting the cost of those fares by nearly 8%, making first class only 20% more expensive than coach as of mid-November.

Beyond these developments, travelers will also be noticing other changes introduced as a result of this summer's experiences:

SWIFTER RESERVATIONS. Too many travelers still encounter long delays in reaching reservations clerks by phone —partly because the clerks are tied up explaining the complicated new fares to other callers—and so more clerks are being added. United claims that all its calls now get answered within 20 seconds.