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Airline Terms
Helpful definitions when talking about airfares:
- Codeshare: An agreement between airlines to sell space on each other’s flights.
The flights will have both the operating carrier’s flight number (the airline that is using its aircraft for the flight), and the codesharing flight number (the partner airline in the agreement) sells space on the flight as if it were its own, and has its own flight number.
For example, Air Canada operates flight AC812 from Chicago O’Hare to Toronto Pearson. United codeshares on this flight, selling space as UA3094.
- Connecting flight: Passengers need to change planes to complete the journey.
- Consolidator: A company that negotiates the purchase of blocks of tickets from an airline and sells that space (at some sort of discount) to the traveling public. Also known as (sometimes): Bucket shops
- Direct or through flight: A flight from origin to destination that makes one or more intermediate stops, but does not require a change of planes.
- Exchange fees: The fee airlines impose to exchange wholly unused nonrefundable tickets to a new itinerary. Travel must remain on the same carrier, and the original reservation must be canceled prior to flight time in order to retain value. The fee for most domestic itineraries is usually $150, while international tickets generally cost $250-$400. Tickets can be used up to one year from the date of the first flight of the customer’s domestic itinerary. For international itineraries, wholly unused nonrefundable tickets can be used up to one year from the date of the original ticket issuance. The change fee on nonrefundable tickets will continue to apply for each change made as well as all other fare terms and conditions. There may be a difference in fare when changing travel plans.
- Illegal connection: Connections that do not adhere to the minimum connection time, and are thus not legal connections because it is deemed that there is not enough time to connect.
- Nonrefundable: If a passenger does not use a ticket, none of the money paid for the ticket will be returned. Many airlines will allow such unused, nonrefundable tickets to be used as a credit toward future travel after paying a fee to change the ticket.
- Nonstop: A flight from origin to destination without stops.
- Nontransferable: The only person who can use the ticket is the one who has his/her name on the ticket, provided the reservation was canceled before departure.
- One-way: Trip from origin to destination with no return flight.
- Preferred airline: Airlines that have offered discounts or preferred handling of requests in exchange for increased market share. In order to capture the greatest potential savings, and maximize our leverage, travelers should use these preferred carriers whenever their fares are lower (or equal to) the fares of other carriers with similar schedules.
- Point-to-point: Refers to the fare-construction principle of charging from one stopover point to another.
- Red-eye: An overnight flight that arrives early the following morning.
- Stopover: A domestic stopover occurs when passenger arrives at a transfer point and fails to depart within four hours, or on the next available flight.