Beware of ITA’s Valentine’s sale. The discount offer is deceptive.

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When is a sale offering a discount of between 20% and 25% not all that it seems? When it’s a sale being promoted by ITA Airways, it would seem.

Across various regions, ITA Airways is currently promoting various versions of its Valentine’s day sale in which the airline appears to be offering between 20% and 25% off Economy and/or Business Class fares that are booked in the next few days.

The terms and conditions vary (slightly) from region to region as does the discount on offer, but the one thing that all the sales appear to have in common is that the savings are not even close to being as good as you may be expecting.

Link to USA sale – “20% off”
Link to UK sale – “25% off”

Checking out the US sale

Having had the sale details drop into my inbox, I was interested to see if I could book any good deals out of LA and although it quickly became apparent that ITA’s fares weren’t competitive for the dates I was considering (even a 20% discount wouldn’t have made ITA the cheapest option), I decided to price up a trip to see what the booking engine would offer me.

On a set of randomly selected dates, the cost of a Los Angeles – Rome round trip Business Class fare came to $5,344.91 (ouch!) …

… so given that the taxes and fees applied in the US and Italy are relatively low, I was expecting to see a revised cost of around $4,300 once I applied the 20% discount code.

That’s not what happened.

Once I added the “GIFT20” discount code, this was the fare that was offered:

I was expecting a discount of around $1,045 (~19.5%) but, instead, I was offered a discount of $630 (~12%).

Given how big that difference was, I decided to try to find out what was going on and, luckily for me, ITA makes it very easy to do that because the it shows the full breakdown of every fare it offers.

Here’s what the breakdown of the discounted fare looked like (focus on the top numbers):

Within the original fare of $5,344.91, ITA has included “fuel surcharges” of $2,080 which make up ~39% of the total cost of the fare.

This “surcharge” has nothing to do with the cost of fuel and is a charge that’s added by the airline and not by any government agency (i.e. this is a charge that’s entirely under the control of the airline).

Crucially, the 20% sale discount that ITA is promoting is not being applied to the “fuel surcharge” component of the fare. It’s only being applied to what the airline is calling the “base fare” and that’s why the actual discount being offered is closer to 12% and not the advertised 20%.

The same is happening in the UK sale

If you’re looking for flights out of the UK, you’re going to run into the same issue.

Here’s a non-discounted Business Class fare for travel between London and New York (via Italy) …

…and here’s the same fare after the, supposed, 25% discount is applied:

That’s a discount of just £242 (14% off the overall fare), but to be fair to ITA, this isn’t all the airline’s fault.

Because the UK imposes ridiculously high taxes on airfares, they make up a significant percentage of this overall fare and as these taxes don’t get discounted (understandably), they have the effect of making the airline discount look worse than it is.

That doesn’t however, mean that ITA isn’t playing the same game here as well.

Of the £1,363.20 that ITA is charging in air transportation charges, £395.20 is classified as “fuel surcharges” and isn’t discounted, so the portion of the fare that ITA is discounting is just £968.

What this means is that ITA’s promised 25% discount is, in reality, only a ~18% discount on the fare it controls.

This is deceptive

If you’ve been reading about the travel world for more than a few minutes, you’ll probably know that when you see a hotel sale that’s offering a percentage discount, that discount is usually based on the standard (flexible) rate and not on the cheapest rate the hotel is offering (usually a non-flexible rate), so you know to adjust your expectations accordingly.

In the world of airline sales, however, things are a little different.

When an airline offers a percentage discount, that discount is almost always applicable to whatever portion of fare that the airline controls and the taxes and fees added to the fare by governments are the only charges that don’t get discounted.

As these extra fees and taxes are not usually egregious (unless you’re flying out of the UK), they don’t often make a big difference to the savings that customers are expecting.

ITA’s latest Valentine’s day sale, however, is different, and the way in which it’s being promoted seems disingenuous.

If an airline is going to advertise a 20% or 25% discount, shouldn’t that discount apply to whatever part of the fare it controls?

Here, the “fuel surcharge” forms part of the airline’s income in the same way as the “base fare”, so why isn’t it being discounted?

Before anyone decides to take to their keyboard in defence of the airline (there’s always at least one person who decides to do this), ask yourself this: If this is acceptable, where does it end?

As the airline controls both the “base fare” and the “fuel surcharge”, would it be ok for it to publish a base fare of $500 and a fuel surcharge of $4,500 and then promote a sale that offers “20% off” when that discount is only going to be applied to the $500? If not, where is the line?

Bottom line

Promoting a “20% off” or “25% off” sale when the discounts that customers will receive will be considerably lower is misleading, and I’m surprised that the various advertising standards authorities haven’t been looking into this.

No one is suggesting that an airline should have to discount the government taxes portion of a fare, but if an airline is going to promote a sale in a way that leads people to believe they’ll be getting a specific percentage off whatever it is charging, that’s what the discount should be and the airline shouldn’t be allowed to use spurious and made up “surcharges” to significantly dilute that discount.

To sum up: If you’ve seen this sale promoted and have been thinking about pricing up a trip, make sure that you keep in mind that the discounts that the sale headlines are showing and the discounts that you may eventually lock in will probably be significantly different numbers. Don’t be fooled by the advertising!