Last week I coined a new air travel term called the Tweak (where airlines not so subtly lower prices on their competitors most prized routes).
I presume it is now an official term — since it was highlighted by one of my favorite consumer sites Consumerist.com (wonder if it should be in Wiki )
Today I was browsing through one of our airfare reports and noticed Northwest Airlines was still up to its normal antics of firing out ridiculously low airfares to seemingly random cities, which I have internally called Crazy Ivan Airfares.
I first heard the term Crazy Ivan years ago whilst reading the Hunt for Red October. Its a naval term that describes how older Russian submarines make madcap moves in random directions to take a quick peek behind to see if anyone is following.
I dont think Minneapolis (Northwest Airlines Headquarters) has many subs nearby, but the Northwest Airlines airfare analysts must be graduates from the Russian submariner school.
For a person who thrives on knowing every little nuance about worldwide airfares, these “Crazy Ivan” airfares make my head spin. I have spent countless hours trying to figure out some sort of pattern or method to the madness.
Sometimes its a partial match of Southwest Airlines Internet Specials, Sometimes its a tweak, other times it seems as though one of the Northwest Airlines airfare analysts has a cousin in Sarasota that needs a cheap airline ticket.
It is usually hard to find seats on these airfares (they have very restricted seat inventory, booked in K class), so they don’t show up often in the tens of millions of shopping queries done each day, so why do they do it?
Take todays price from the 12:30pm EDT airfare feed from Portland, Oregon to Hartford, Connecticut, of $198 roundtrip (screen shot above). This price is $172 lower than the current cheapest price on any legacy airline including Northwest previous low from the day before (only Southwest has this price point for internet specials on the route).
Some example cities that have Crazy Ivan Airfares just today at $158+tax roundtrip include:
- New Orleans Portland, Maine
- Boston New Orleans
- Ft. Lauderdale Burlington
- Jacksonville Rochester
- Ft. Myers Richmond
Maybe if I look to the starboard side at the bottom half of the hour I won’t see these airfares …
For those of you who don’t mind some long connections, you can save a lot of cash on these “Crazy Ivan” airfares.
[...] Many of these fares will only be around for a short period because they are “tweaks”, others are just plain “Crazy Ivans“. [...]
Any way you could add a feature to generate reports for all fares under a certain dollar amount for routing over x miles?
We have the ability to do all sorts of slicing of our huge database of airfares.
If you are willing to write up a spec I’ll put it in our queue.
How about a “Let’s see where I can afford to go on vacation” view. I want to be able to enter dates, departure city, and highest price. I would like the search engine tell me where I can go!! Any chance of that?
I have tried many times to find the fares you send and most times that fare does not come up but I keep trying and hoping to catch a good one soon. Thanks.
Since I live in seattle I am usually only interested in airfare deals from my city – ie. a low fare from detroit to san francisco dosen’t interest me.
I there a way to sort the deals by “home city” and send only reports for those cities?
Thanks.
Rick – just found your blog. Great stuff.
It’s funny that you were looking at a PDX-BDL round-trip. I used to fly BDL (or PVD)-PDX roughly every two weeks during the last two years and I always wondered why I was able to sometimes pick up $150+tax fares on Continental through Newark or Houston. I never paid more than $250+tax. Any reason why these smaller East Coast airports see a lot of these cheap fares, while a EWR-PDX non-stop round-trip is typically double?