A Tip of the Hat

Last November my girlfriend and I went online looking for plane tickets home to Winnipeg for the winter break. For the last four or five years I have almost exclusively flown with WestJet and so they were my first stop towards booking. Lucky me; they had a cheap, direct flight roughly around the time we wanted to leave, so, I went to buy two. The total came to fives times the price on the tickets. Whoah...back up. We noticed when we tried to buy a single ticket, this problem did not occur (and here was our error), so we went ahead and bought one ticket with the intention of turning around and buying a second immediatly.

The price listed for that second ticket was now ~$400 as opposed to $150 dollars. Oh, crap. I get it, yield management.... awesome.

To buy two tickets with WestJet would now cost us a total of ~$700, which we were completely unwilling to pay with Air Canada selling a similar pair for sub $500. Brand loyalty is a fickle thing. I called WestJet, told them I needed a refund. They asked, why, and I told them their website had not provided with me a enough information to make the correct economic decision. It had hinted towards it, but I hadn't caught on right away. 'You should probably tell people how many tickets are remaining at each price bracket so this confusion doesn't happen again'.

A lot of people must have given them similar advice.



Because, they have added this handy little indicator to their online purchase menu.

It is nice to see a company that listens. People call in about a problem, or report it online, the company reviews the comments and addresses the problem within a relatively short time period. Kudos! to you WestJet. What impresses me more about this situation is that I assume (perhaps incorrectly) that like my case, the majority of these complaints were made offline, with consumers calling in and demanding answers/refunds. It is nice to know that there are links between the customer service staff in the call centre and the user experience staff that work on the website. This un-siloed approach says very positive things about WestJet's flexibility.