It's time to rethink codesharing. U.S. airlines and government agencies took the lead in the previous century to make the practice profitable and acceptable. Now it's time to harness 21st century technology to make it more sensible.
Airline alliances and other forms of interlining are far too entrenched to be abolished, but it's not too late to apply some fresh thinking to the enduring problem that codesharing creates: consumer confusion.
The Transportation Department (DOT) has spent a lot of time and energy during the last few years ensuring that consumers get adequate notice about who's doing the flying on codeshare flights.
During 2013, the DOT made anonymous test calls to large travel agencies to verify compliance with disclosure rules and ended up collecting tens of thousands of dollars in civil penalties from such giants as Carlson Wagonlit, Liberty Travel, AAA and others.
Accompanying these enforcement orders were DOT press releases, typically quoting the Transportation Secretary saying things like "When passengers buy an airline ticket, they have a right to know which airline will be operating their flight." Of course they do.
For the same reason, the DOT wants passengers to know the full all-in price of their flight, which is why we now have a regulation requiring that all fares be advertised and quoted with all taxes and mandatory fees included.
But if the DOT wanted to be consistent, wouldn't it similarly require codesharing airlines to give top billing to the airline actually operating the flight? Instead of telling consumers, "Your flight is AA, but it is actually operated by BA," why not say the reverse: "Your flight is BA, and it's being promoted by AA"?
If the most important thing for the passenger to know is the name of the airline that is actually operating the flight, why allow airlines to promote in a way that the information is initially hidden and then disclosed later on? If the DOT doesn't like that approach for fares, why should it tolerate it for codes?
These questions came to mind as we reviewed the DOT's latest consumer-protection proposals, which would include some tougher disclosure standards for agents and online intermediaries who are often on the front lines when it comes to undoing confusion that they didn't create.
It occurs to us that there might be other ways to correct the inherent deception in codesharing than to keep tightening the screws on travelsellers with more and more rules and "gotcha!" enforcement actions.
Haven't we had enough of those?
We're not sure what 21st century codesharing should look like, but we're pretty sure it need not look like 20th century codesharing, which took off in the 1980s as a way for airlines to improve their screen position on green-screen GDS displays.
Even today, a BA-to-BA connection will look better on the screen than an AA-to-BA connection, though it's often really the same thing.
But even the basic disclosure required today doesn't tell the passenger whether the two carriers are commonly owned (Iberia-British Airways), in a co-branded joint venture (Air France-Delta), in a contractual feeder relationship (United-United Express) or merely glorified interline pals (JetBlue and Hawaiian).
As the industry lurches toward IATA's New Distribution Capability and other new ways of doing business, couldn't the airlines put their minds to improving upon the rudimentary alphanumeric soup that serves as their standard product definition?