Can You Trust Air Travel Deals Advertised on the Internet?
When USAir advertises fares at $100, but when they balloon to $300 when you try to take advantage of them because of the taxes and fees, does that count as advertising fraud? When at any miserable dive in America, they feel free to add on a resort fee to the advertised room rate, are they really allowed to do that? When in the papers they have air travel deals advertising flights to Europe starting at $129, should they be forced to make good on their promise?
Travel articles that dispense advice on how to save money traveling, always tell you to sign up for e-mail alerts from all kinds of travel services for discounts and deals there might be on offer. The question is though, how do you know that those deals are real and not just teases? The language used in those offers are always about caveats like ‘available for certain destinations’ or ‘offer subject to availability’.
Jet Blue Cheeps are its offers put out on Twitter. They usually advertise a handful of seats, and announce the deadline. As time goes on, the available seats run out. But JetBlue offers are usually advertised for the number of seats available clearly shown.
Most travel deals advertised will be available on certain dates alone. Where companies try to make it look like their deals are available for a longer time than they really are, that is where they cross the line. If those dates are listed at all, they’ll usually be buried in fine print at the bottom of the page. If a company doesn’t make it clear without sending you to the fine print section the dates on which a deal is available, youI should probably leave it alone. Consumer forums around the Internet are rife with complaints over how travel websites refuse to publish taxes and fees, and how they refuse to make it easy to find out the timeframe air travel deals are available in. They do this because it’s cheap advertising for them this way.
In general, offers on hotel stays, unlike air travel deals, are likely to be more worthwhile looking into. And that would be especially true of advertising done by a particular hotel as opposed to advertising done by a travel website for all hotels in the destination. Advertising by a travel website usually is less reliable than advertising by a specific airline, hotel or anything else. For instance, when a travel website advertises a car rental rate of $15 a day over a weekend, that usually doesn’t include major destinations like LA or NYC. When a car rental agency like Hertz makes such a claim, it usually includes every single major city.
The only consolation here is that bait and switch ads are nothing new to us. We have had these on flyers and newspaper ads forever. It’s just that e-mail and the Internet make it much easier for them to go back on their word.