It’s the classic complaint: “You had one job…” (and you didn’t do it!) Airline search engines have only one job: to search for flights. Yet they don’t do it. Why not?
Earlier this week, Nick at Frequent Miler observed that United’s search engine misses a huge portion of flights when you ask it to search from major metropolitan areas: “United search tool doesn’t include ‘all airports’ (even when it says it does).”
Last year, I noticed that Delta will flag a fare as “lowest” even if there’s a lower fare right there on the page: “Why Can’t Delta Do Basic Math?”
And there are many more examples. The general pattern is this: If you ask an airline’s website to search all flights, it will, instead, search some flights.
I can only think of three reasons for incomplete search results like these:
- Searching is so difficult that the airlines can’t pull it off;
- Searching is not difficult, but the airlines are incompetent; or
- The airlines are purposely deceptive.
Having made it as far as graduate school in computer science, I reject the first possibility. We know how to search. And third party search engines seem to get it right.
Could it be incompetence? Maybe. My Delta example is pretty egregious. There’s a high fare marked “lowest fare,” and then, right there next to it on the page, is a lower fare. (It’s like when I sometimes get assigned the same seat as someone else. How does that happen?)
But I suspect it’s deception. I suspect the airlines are nudging people toward higher and more profitable fares.
Whatever the answer, a related question is, is it legal? I’m not a lawyer. But to my lay-person’s mind, it seems like it must violate some law. If I ask, say, United (to continue Nick’s example), “what’s the cheapest flight from the New York area to Zurich,” don’t they have a legal obligation to provide no answer or the right answer?
By analogy, if I ask a hardware store how much a hammer costs and they raise the price because I’m naive, that’s illegal (I think). How is this different?
Anyway, what do you think? Are airlines incapable, incompetent, or deceptive with their search engines?
