Hawaii's main interisland airlines, saying they still don't make money on most trips between the islands, are trying to battle double booking, which they say is a costly nuisance. Airlines to crack down
Hawaiian stocks stumble
on double booking
By Russ Lynch
rlynch@starbulletin.comHawaiian Airlines and Aloha Airlines have both hired the services of an Arizona-based airline technology business to help them track down passengers who book on several flights to give themselves choices, even though they can only fly on one.
The trademarked "Super Dupe Snooper" from Airline Automation Inc. ferrets out people booking under the same name or similar names on flights at different times of the day, allowing the airline to backtrack and find out how real the bookings are.
Aloha Airlines is the latest customer and expects to have its system in place soon. Hawaiian Airlines put the system to work about a month ago.
Both airlines are looking to cut costs, and are working under a temporary exemption from federal anti-monopoly laws to allow them to coordinate interisland capacity. The result, they say, is that interisland flights can no longer be treated like a bus service.
There is less capacity and fewer planes on popular routes, and those such as Honolulu-Kahului are fully booked days ahead of the scheduled flight. Advance bookings are a must.
The trouble is, the airlines say, some people will book, say, 4 p.m., 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. flights home on the same day, knowing they will only take one.
The reservations computers show three bookings in that case. Everyone has to pay 48 hours before flights these days and that clears a lot of the double booking, but prior to that the extra booked seats cannot be sold.
The new software searches the bookings, looking for duplicated names flying on itineraries that don't seem to make sense.
When a duplication is found, there are different ways to deal with it, the computer services company said. If the reservations and itineraries are in an identical name and show they came from the same source, there can be an automatic cancellation of one or more of the flights, with a notification to the traveler.
If the itinerary is the same and the name seems similar, the airline is alerted and can make a call and check if it is intentional.
"It costs money and makes it more costly to fly interisland" when there are excess bookings in the system, said Aloha Airlines spokesman Stu Glauberman. "This type of software should remedy that."
During the holiday season flights were 10 percent to 15 percent overbooked, he said.
Keoni Wagner, a spokesman for Hawaiian Airlines, said his company signed a deal with Airline Automation in mid-2002 and got the system operating about a month ago.
"We haven't done any full-scale evaluation yet but we're very hopeful it is going to help us solve the double and triple bookings that we see sometimes in the interisland market," Wagner said.
Hawaiian had some flights over the holidays leaving with a few empty seats even though the computers said they were fully booked.
"The quality of inventory is paramount. Empty seats are lost revenues," said Kelly McCullough, a spokesman for Airline Automation. "When seats go empty off a gate, that's the only inventory an airline has to sell."
Aloha Airlines
Hawaiian Airlines Airline Automation Inc.