Tracking Deals That Seem Too Good to Be True

Let’s say, just for a minute, that you sell cars for a living. If you want to woo buyers with low prices in a newspaper ad, you’re required to disclose how many cars you’re actually selling at that price. Even if you put the information in tiny print, those few words (“1 at this price”) serve notice to consumers out there who worry about bait-and-switch tactics.

But if you’re in the travel business, your life is not so circumscribed. Airlines, which avoid many state restrictions because their business crosses state lines, routinely advertise discount fares that apply only to a minority of the coach seats on a flight, never disclosing how many tickets can be had at the “come-on” price. Ticket brokers, tour operators, cruise lines and hotels enjoy similar situations. And it’s almost impossible to pry loose “inventory” information from any of them.

Combine that with the trade’s various prices--one price for weekends, another for weekdays; one price for busy weeks, another for slower ones--and you have a confused marketplace.

This situation is worth attention because A) many consumers don’t appraise their vacation spending with the same careful eye they use on business deals; and B) aside from housing and car payments, a vacation can be the biggest expense you have all year.

The solution is healthy skepticism, comparison shopping and close questioning. Look at any collection of travel advertisements, and you’re likely to find that behind most bold-print price quotes lurk costlier realities. But even if the come-on price is inflated a bit, some of those offers may still be better than you’ll do elsewhere.

Without identifying myself as a reporter, I called to follow up on several recent travel ads, and came up with these case studies. (Later, I called the companies’ headquarters and identified myself in order to pose follow-up questions.)

* On Nov. 22, the ticket broker 1-800-FLY CHEAP’s newspaper ads announced round-trip fares between LAX and Chicago for $156 in big type. (Then in tiny print, the broker said that number was based on rates from 11 days before and subject to change. In fact, said the tiny print, the large-print numbers “are simply to show the average discount level” offered.)

So two days after the ad ran, I called FLY CHEAP and asked if the $156 rate was available for flights on Dec. 12 and 14. No, the ticket agent said. Best fare for those dates was $264.50 on America West.

How could I get the $156 fare? “December’s a busy month,” said the agent. “It probably won’t be available in December, and it has to be a night flight.”

Was a Dec. 12-14 LAX-Chicago fare of $264.50 a good deal? A day later I called an American Express travel agent, asked for the cheapest LAX-Chicago round trip on those days and got back a figure of $340, which might be cut to $290.50 if I used my company’s corporate discount. In other words, on this day FLY CHEAP was pricier than it first appeared, but still cheaper than my usual source.

Tom Herrington, chief operating officer of Travel 800 L.L.C., the company behind FLY CHEAP, blamed the fare gap on topsy-turvy Christmas-season airline price fluctuations. “Any other time of the year, with a little bit of flexibility in the dates, you’d have gotten that [$156] rate,” he said.

* Also on Nov. 22, the package-tour specialist Pleasant Holidays ran ads for eight-day Hawaii vacations, including air fare and hotel, beginning at $359 per person excluding taxes. To get this rate, you had to depart on a weekday.

When I called, the ticket agent warned me of higher prices and lower availability around Christmas and early January, so I gave her a starting date of Monday, Jan. 11. She came back with a price of $420 per person, before taxes. (If we left on a weekend, the price was $20 per person higher.)

Getting that advertised $359 fare, the operator explained, depended on getting the cheapest possible ticket from Pleasant Holidays’ airline partner American Trans Air. The operator reported that by Nov. 24, two days after the ad appeared, all those tickets were gone for January.

Pleasant Holidays spokesman Ken Phillips said he couldn’t disclose the number of vacation packages sold at that rock-bottom price, but he said that of five weekly departures from LAX, two typically carried passengers paying that amount. It’s common, he said, for bottom-priced packages to sell out within a day of being advertised. But cancellations are not unusual, he added, and many customers eventually get the bottom price by calling back regularly until a possibility opens up.

* On Nov. 17, the Apple Core group of five budget hotels in Manhattan unveiled a winter special. The group’s four Manhattan hotels (548 rooms altogether) would offer rates as low as $89 nightly for stays between Dec. 13, 1998, and Feb. 28, 1999. In New York, where the average room rate hovers around $200, this was an attractive offer. When I called on Nov. 24, all the $89 rooms were sold out, the operator said. For $10 a night more, however, the operator could give me a nonsmoking room with king-size bed at the Quality Hotel & Suites Midtown on the nights I named. Like the other companies in this column, the hotel chain declined to say how many rooms were originally available at the $89 rate.

The bottom line: Don’t take every ad at face value, but if you are hunting bargains, don’t ignore those ads, either.

Consider another offer I checked from the Galleria Park hotel in San Francisco. From late November through Jan. 10, the hotel was offering a “Pay the Decade You Were Born” special. A spokeswoman said 30 to 40 of the hotel’s 177 rooms were set aside most nights for the promotion--though many have since been booked.

And when I called the reservations line on behalf of my father, who was born in 1919, they actually had a room. The rate, as promised, was $10 a night ($11.40 including tax) for three nights in the week before Christmas.

Unfortunately, our family already had other holiday plans.

Reynolds travels anonymously at the newspaper’s expense, accepting no special discounts or subsidized trips. He welcomes comments and suggestions, but cannot respond individually to letters and calls. Write Travel Insider, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053 or e-mail chris.reynolds@latimes.com.