Some Airline Tickets Now Nonrefundable

The major airlines are gearing up for a possible strike at Northwest Airlines by making their normally flexible first-class and business-class tickets nonrefundable on some routes.

The temporary policy is an attempt to prevent speculative booking by travelers afraid of being stranded by a strike.

“Passengers are going to have to make a decision who they’re going to fly on,” Joe Hopkins, a spokesman for UAL Corp.’s United Airlines, said Monday.

One reason airlines have traditionally justified charging higher prices for first-class and business-class fares is that these tickets are flexible and refundable.

The airlines quietly put the temporary policy into effect last week for flights to and from Northwest’s hubs--Minneapolis-St. Paul, Detroit and Memphis, Tenn.

America West Airlines has already been issuing nonrefundable tickets and will do so through Sept. 26. Delta Air Lines is making tickets nonrefundable from Saturday, when a Northwest pilots’ strike could begin, through Sept. 9; United and US Airways are issuing nonrefundable tickets from Saturday through Sept. 15. Delta will waive its normal $75 fee to change such a ticket to a different date or flight, but the other carriers are apparently leaving the fee in place.

Air-fare watcher Terry Trippler, founder of the Airfare Report, said the airlines are “clearly taking advantage of the situation.”

The airlines say they’re just protecting themselves.

“We don’t want to find ourselves with a situation on Saturday with a large number of no-show passengers if there’s no strike. We wouldn’t have time to sell that seat to somebody else,” Hopkins said.

Northwest has said a strike by pilots and a corresponding shutdown of its Airlink service offered by Mesaba Airlines and Express I Airlines would eliminate 2,640 daily departures at 223 airports in the U.S. and abroad. Northwest’s competitors say they can’t pick up that slack.

Competing carriers have agreements to accept some kinds of Northwest tickets in the event of a strike, and Northwest is negotiating to expand those agreements, Northwest spokeswoman Marta Laughlin said. “The reality is that some people will not be accommodated even on other airlines or may have to go through a couple different forms of transportation” before they fly on other carriers, she said.