Having Bumpy Flight Before Boarding

Question: I made a reservation for my son for a round-trip Super Saver flight on Delta, where you must pay for the ticket 30 days in advance. The flight was between Cincinnati and Los Angeles. When he went down to pay for his ticket five weeks before the flight, they had canceled his reservation three days before. They offered him a ticket at a higher price. What’s the story on this practice?--J.W.

Answer: Those special Super Saver flights, which virtually all the airlines embraced a few months ago, have more fine type in the agreement than you’ll find in a used-car warranty.

What apparently happened, according to Ray Mason, reservations manager here for Delta Airlines, is that either you or your son didn’t read the explanation fully or the ticket agent didn’t explain it adequately or both--probably the latter. Don’t feel badly about it--it’s par for the course.

Yes, you’re right, the reservation does indeed have to be made at least 30 days before the departure date. But, alas, it doesn’t end there. It also has to be picked up and paid for no later than 14 days after the reservation has been made, Mason adds, “whichever date comes first.” Aha, note the phraseology.

For instance: Suppose you made the reservation 31 days before your departure. That’s in accordance with the rules, and you would think that you still have 14 days to pick up and pay for the ticket, right? Not so--you’ve got one day to do this because the day after you make the reservation is the 30th day before your departure, and you must complete your reservation by then. If you find all of that as baffling as I do, we can either conclude that there’s something wrong with the two of us or that we’re in the mainstream, which is the position that I personally prefer to take.

We can, Mason feels, reconstruct the chronology of events with you and your son. You apparently made the reservation about two months before his departure date. If he then went to pick up and pay for the tickets “five weeks before the flight,” as you say, then, sure enough, he would have missed that 14-day deadline by about three days, which is when Delta canceled the reservation.

The airline, Mason adds, regrets the misunderstanding.

Q: My perplexing questions represent typical fuzziness in the minds of many self-employed.

I am past 70. This is the point at which it doesn’t matter how much I earn because my Social Security payments won’t be reduced. I am self-employed, and I have always reported the income on form SE 1040 and have paid the tax as indicated.

My questions are:

--Shouldn’t the SE tax paid each year trigger a recalculation of my Social Security payments--upwards?

--When should this occur each year?

--If the tax paid is only a few hundred dollars each year, would the change in Social Security payments be so little that they would not bother with the adjustment?

As far as I can figure out, no adjustments have been made for the self-employed taxes paid for several years.--R.S.

A: Would a benign Uncle Sam leave you hanging out there, without adjustments, indefinitely? Perish the thought.

The adjustments are made, all right, Joe Giglio, a local spokesman for the Social Security Administration assures us. But because there is roughly a two-year time lag before it shows up on your checks, you’ve apparently forgotten the last time this happened. (It’s pretty hard to close the gap much tighter than this. That’s because it’s more than a year after an increase in your earnings that this fact is even reported to the agency and can be fed into its computer.) The cost-of-living adjustment, however, is automatically added every January, so it is already in place. And you’re quite right--once you’ve hit age 70 you can earn as much as you’re capable of earning without reducing your Social Security benefits.

The last such adjustment, which is called the Automatic Earnings Recomputation Operation (or AERO), was made last October and reflected changes reported for the taxable year 1982. It showed up on the checks of about 2 million Social Security beneficiaries last December, averaged about $21 apiece and netted each of them a retroactive check of about $480.

The same recomputation will take place this October, Giglio assures us, recomputing your earnings for 1983, and this will show up on your December, 1985, check.

Since the whole thing is a computerized operation, even a slight increase in your earnings for the year will be taken into account--the machine doesn’t mind the “bother” of all this.

What happens each year is essentially this, according to Giglio: Let’s assume, for instance, that you turned 72 this year, which means that you were born in 1913. The Social Security Administration then takes the year in which you were 62 years old, an arbitrary selection, as its base (that would be 1975 in your case) and computes your Social Security benefits on the basis of your earnings for each of the years 1975 back to 1951--another arbitrary date, but one which reflects the beginning of the sharp increases in Social Security benefits.

That’s 24 years in your case. From these base years, Giglio adds, the Social Security Administration picks your 19 best years of earnings and drops the others--in your case again, the five worst years you experienced in earnings from 1951 to 1975. Your earnings for those 19 years forms the basis for figuring your basic Social Security benefit amount.

What then happens each year under AERO, he continues, is that the current year’s earnings are checked against those base years, and if the current earnings are higher than one or more of those preceding years, the lowest earnings year is dropped, and the higher current figure is substituted--and the whole kit and caboodle is then recomputed. If your current earnings are lower than all of the preceding years--quite possible since, at your age, you may not be working a full schedule--no change is made in the base figure.

Think of the mind-boggling job this represented before the Computer Age.

Q: Regarding the recent letter on the Automatic Teller Machine error, this same type of thing happened to me, but even better.

I was very low on money and went to withdraw some cash. I took what I thought, by my records, I could take. I retrieved my card and receipt, and minutes later, in the car, looked at my “balance” and found that the Bank of America had “given” me $600.

After a guilt-filled, sleepless night, I was back at the ATM to find that the computer had corrected itself.--T.F.

A: Thanks for relaying the experience. The column flushed forth several similar experiences of which yours is typical. The earlier item was about a man who, mysteriously, had about $100 ripped off from his account by an ATM. Equally mysteriously, the ATM restored the amount a couple of days later.

Customer complaints about ATM errors seem to be gaining credibility. There have been some grudging admissions recently by local bankers that typographical errors by ATMs might be possible.

All’s-Well-That-Ends-Well Dept.: A recent column explored the case of J.McD., who was constantly being dunned by Citibank and Visa for a $350 air conditioner despite the fact that he had simply picked up the unit for his employer--paying for it with a company check, but presenting his Visa card for identification. There is a happy ending.

After the column was printed, Citibank belatedly traced the transaction down and admitted that J.McD. should never have been billed for the air conditioner--a debt that his bankrupt employer had walked away from. Both the item and all finance charges have been expunged from his records, Citibank says.

“We slip up from time to time,” a Citibank spokesman admitted, “and we’re sorry it happened and that it took so long to resolve.”

Here’s a tip, however, from Marvin B. Kaplan, a spokesman for Associated Credit Bureaus Inc., a national trade group for credit-reporting organizations: “Just to make sure that Citibank has followed through on this and has really wiped it off his record, this man should buy something--anything--with his Visa card as soon as possible. That way he’ll be able to check his next Visa bill and make sure that the old charge, sure enough, is no longer on it.”

Don G. Campbell cannot answer mail personally but will respond in this column to consumer questions of general interest. Write to Consumer VIEWS, You section, The Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053.