Handling "Basic Economy" flight fares with hidden a-la-carte fees

[Deb Nicholson]

On Thu, 2019-02-14 at 18:18 +0000, Neil McGovern wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 03:33:35PM -0800, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
> > 
> >  I'm not sure how to solve this problem.  For the moment, the
> > advice is "be
> > on the lookout for this and when in doubt, just ask for a flight
> > cost
> > exception", but I'd love if folks have ideas on how we can solve
> > this
> > problem more formally. I guess my first question is whether folks
> > have found
> > a search tool that allows excluding of these Basic Economy fares?
> For info, at GNOME (who uses the Conservancy travel policy with the
> serial number filed off) we have a "basic economy fairs don't count".
> Using Hipmunk it's certainly possible to exclude these fairs.
> 
> We are also keeping a list of long-hall carriers which we consider to
> be
> basic economy.

This makes a lot of sense to me. The cost for one suitcase and one
carry-on is not unreasonable for travellers to expect to be included.
And Conservancy definitely does not want to get into the game of asking
travellers to save checked bag receipts -- that sounds time-consuming
and pointless. 

I also think our more frequent flyers should be able to amass points or
least choose their seats (a common airline perk even at the lowest
status levels) instead of constantly cramming into a middle seat on the
WOW of the week just to save $10 or $20 per trip. Of course they could
use 10 or 15 minutes of Conservancy staff time to request a flight that
costs $20 extra where there is some hope of doing work but this seems
like a no-brainer for us. If we want people to travel for Conservancy
and make in-person connections then we should be making these kinds of
reasonable allowances easy and non-time-consuming for everyone. 

> 
> Neil
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-- 
Deb Nicholson <deb at sfconservancy.org>
Software Freedom Conservancy