I’m old enough (perhaps you are, too) to remember when airlines published all their airfares in their timetables, which were issued once a month. Back then airlines were regulated by the government and there were just two types of airfares: first class (F) and economy (Y), or in some cases first class night (FN) and economy class night (YN). Today, there can be up to 26 different fare classes, although that, too, may change soon.
I was reminded of this quaint past when I read a report that Route Happy, an air travel website that ranks flights based on not just airfare but factors such as flight duration and seat pitch, was being acquired by Washington-based ATPCO (the Airline Tariff Publishing Company).
For those who aren’t familiar with ATPCO, it works with more than 450 airlines and acts as a bridge between almost all of the airlines’ and travel industry’s fare data and pricing websites and search engines such as Sabre, Amadeus and Travelport; to airline central reservation systems; and to online travel agencies such as Expedia and Priceline; and other service providers in the travel industry.
When I first started tracking airfares in the 1990s, ATPCO allowed airlines to change airfares three times a day, Monday through Friday (10 a.m., 12:30 p.m. and 5 p.m.) and just once a day on weekends at 8 p.m. That made for some interesting fun with “fat finger” airfare mistakes, such as an epic 77-cent round-trip mistake on US Airways that was entered by some hapless employee on a Friday evening and could not be corrected until the 8 p.m. ATPCO update on Saturday (my theory was that people are fatigued at the end of the week). And these fares were valid for a whole year of travel.
