Fare War Fuels Phone Frenzy, Jams Airports

The bedraggled young man with bloodshot eyes maneuvered past 150 people to the front of the Southwest Airlines ticket line. Then he begged for help.

He was getting married in 3 1/2 hours under the Hollywood sign, he said, and here he was, at Los Angeles International Airport, facing a three-hour wait to buy a ticket for a “buddy.” He still had to pick up his tux, he said. He still needed a haircut.

Nice try, the ticket agents told him, only in gentler words, and sent him back where he came from: the end of the line.

Since Southwest kicked off a rollicking summer air fare war Friday, the scramble for tickets as cheap as $25 one-way has been wild and woeful.

Phone lines to the carriers are jammed and customers, so desperate to buy tickets that they are willing to wait hours in line, are arriving at airports with items usually seen around campsites. Caught in the havoc are regular customers who are quite willing to pay full price but must now troop to the airport to make reservations.

Many in the hordes that crowded ticket counters at LAX and Burbank airport on Monday had begun their quest for airborne bargains over the weekend, calling the ticketing line at one of the many airlines now temporarily offering lower fares. Getting a busy signal, they hit the redial button. And thus began an often hours-long exercise in phone futility.

Southwest estimated that its national reservation system was being bombarded with 60,000 calls a minute.

Some die-hards logged on and tried to order tickets via the company’s Internet address, only to find that busy too. Some dialed travel agents--and couldn’t get through, or found that the agents were equally stymied by the crush.

And so they came to the airports.

They came with chocolate and peanuts and other fortifying foods. They came with Deepak Chopra tomes and summer-reading romance novels. They came with lawn chairs and sleeping bags, Walkmans and pinochle cards.

They came, they saw, they waited. “This is like a Disney line,” said Joee Ohanian, who was at Southwest in Burbank with her two children to buy $100 round-trip tickets to New Orleans. It’s like standing for ‘Indiana Jones.’ ”

The Southwest promotion, celebrating the discount carrier’s 25th anniversary, has pushed fares as low as many travel experts can remember. The promotion is good only on tickets purchased by July 23 for travel between Aug. 19 and Oct. 31, and excludes certain blackout dates--a fact some airport customers were chagrined to learn after a long wait. Limited numbers of tickets are available on each flight, with very few left for destinations east of the Mississippi.

Connor Evans, a 26-year-old actor in a red baseball cap and sleeveless jean shirt, just wanted to visit his folks in his hometown of Lubbock, Texas.

He was quite willing to pay the $227 round-trip fare, if only he could have gotten through on the phone. So he came to LAX. He waited for two hours. Then the computers went down.

Mad? Nah. “My day’s gone now anyway,” he said with a mellow drawl.

It figured that Evans was the one carrying the Chopra book, and a calming title at that: “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success.”

Despite ample opportunity, there were few signs of flaring tempers and a surprising amount of good-naturedness.

“The passengers have been so awesome. They’ve been going up to McDonald’s and bringing us food,” said a Southwest ticket agent at LAX named Mary Ann, who looked bright-eyed even as a customer asked for the umpteenth time: “So, can I go to . . . ?”

In keeping with Southwest’s boast of being not only the cheapest but the most informal airline, Mary Ann sought to head off any growing tensions when the computers crashed. (This is, after all, the airline that encourages its flight attendants to crack jokes over the loudspeaker when a plane is taking too long to taxi in.) She announced to the assembled customers that they would now play a little trivia game.

She offered a $25 discount coupon to the person with the largest hole in their sock. (Many happily produced the unpleasant evidence.) She offered another to anyone with a photograph of their dog. (“Husbands and wives don’t count,” Mary Ann ruled).

Kendra Cross, a college student from Portland, Ore., won a certificate for having the most lipstick containers in her purse--nine. The $25 coupon would cover half a discounted fare back home.

Southwest’s latest promotion is part of an industry routine. Just as carriers offer sales in the early spring to get a jump on the peak summer travel season, they also cut prices heading into the fall. The idea, industry experts say, is to keep the summer traffic going as long as possible into the traditionally weak winter season.

“That’s typical Southwest,” said one industry analyst, John Pincavage. “They tend to do that whenever they think they’re not getting a big enough piece of the revenue.

“Obviously, the big guys have to match it, so it affects the market,” he said. “But they match it on a capacity-controlled basis so it doesn’t completely destroy their pricing structure.”

As the lines flowed and ebbed Monday afternoon and the destinations sold out, airline officials hoped that customers still willing to make the trek to the airport would come as two Burbank residents, Kristie Carsten and Will Areu, came to Burbank airport: with patience aplenty and a fondness for flexible adventure.

“We’re going to pick someplace and just go,” said the 22-year-old Areu. “We’ll go back [home] with tickets to Evansville, Ind., if we have to.”