Simon Calder: View from the cheap seats

"A true last-minute flight, travelling the same or next day," is what Simon Shepherd is seeking on the internet – so far without success, according to his e-mail.

"While the 'no-frills' crowd can generally generate a short-notice fare, many of the mainstream airline travel sites cannot – except at very high full-fare prices. So if we want to go somewhere not served by low-cost airlines, are we left with only www.lastminute.com or the vagaries of www.priceline.co.uk?"

The latter is a "name your own price" site that has proved good in the past, but with which I am not having much luck: at the fares I name, Priceline isn't selling.

Where, wonders Mr Shepherd, "are the on-line (or off-line) equivalent of the old 'bucket-shops' which used to sell empty seats hours before departure?"

Time does funny things to memory, but I do not recall that flogging off the last few seats on a plane was ever bucket-shop territory. For years, you have been able to buy a long-haul flight through a discount agent for less than the airline will sell to you direct, but there is rarely any reward for booking at the last minute.

On the contrary, most scheduled airlines raise prices steeply as departure approaches – especially on European flights. Yesterday I checked fares on this morning's departures from London to Rome, returning tomorrow evening.

Alitalia wanted £554, British Airways £459, Go £290 and Ryanair £281. Through www.lastminute.com, I found a fare on Alitalia of £260, but this involved a change of planes in Venice on the outbound leg and a journey of five and a half hours.

The latest figures from the International Air Transport Association show that three out of every 10 seats on its member airlines' flights are empty. At this point the astute reader will suggest that a good way to fill them is to sell them at almost any price at the airport. But conventional aviation wisdom does not agree. The airlines' rationale for putting up fares is that anyone who books so late probably has a pressing and unforeseen need to travel, and is therefore willing to pay much more than those who planned months ago.

Many carriers have tried cutting fares for standby passengers: British Airways, Virgin Atlantic and BMI (in its previous incarnation as British Midland) spent years selling standby seats on domestic or transatlantic flights. Prospective passengers turned up at the airport and hung around, chewing on fingernails, until minutes before departure, when the lucky ones were allowed on board.

On British Airways' Shuttle flights to Belfast, Edinburgh and Glasgow, the standby traveller with a bit of cash to spare could avoid any sense of tension. BA had a "turn-up-and-go" system for normal passengers that involved keeping a plane on permanent, er, standby. Anyone prepared to cough up the full fare was guaranteed a seat – even if it meant flying that extra aircraft with just one paying customer. With 10 minutes to go, if there was no sign of a standby seat materialising, the passenger needed only announce him- or herself as a full-fare flyer, and a whole plane would be laid on.

Sophisticated business travellers soon latched on to the idea that, 99 times out of 100, they could halve the cost of travel. On the odd occasion when they had to switch horses and pay up, they would enjoy unparalleled comfort and attention.

Handy for passengers, hopeless for profits. BA ditched the deal. Virgin Atlantic went through the same learning process. It used to sell off-peak New York-London tickets for as little as £55 one-way to travellers who bought on the day of departure. The deal attracted a few people who would not otherwise have flown, which was the point of the exercise. There were many more who would have paid a higher price for the trip, but saw the standby option as a great way to avoid high fares.

The world has changed; anyone turning up at Kennedy airport for Virgin's flight to Heathrow last night would have been invited to pay £426 for an economy seat.

These days, "standby" is usually reserved for airline staff travelling on cheap or free tickets on a space-available basis, or people without a confirmed booking for a flight who hope that some passengers will fail to show up. But while the chance to find a last-minute scheduled bargain has gone, probably for good, charter airlines are still selling off tickets for whatever they can get as the hours tick away before departure. You can turn up any day at our favourite overseas charter airport, Palma, confident of picking up an instant one-way flight to Britain for around £75.

Standers-by, though, cannot be choosers; when I tried for a seat to London, all I could find was a flight from Majorcan capital to Manchester, which ended up being diverted to Birmingham.

Yet just as the early booker might start to feel horribly smug, the airline formerly known as Jersey European has announced the return of standby flights. The carrier became British European two years ago, and last week became the latest airline to sport a made-up name, Flybe. From October, the "new" airline will sell short-notice flights on each of its 1,000 departures a week at a flat £50 one-way. Good news for Mr Shepherd, though Flybe ventures no further south than Toulouse.

Flybe IS also to abolish what it calls the "unpopular industry practice" of overbooking. Unpopular with whom? Not the airlines, who can fill more seats and make more money by selling more tickets than there are places on the plane; and not with smart passengers, who realise it keeps fares down by minimising empty seats. Overbooking is fine – so long as the airlines handle with generosity the occasions when their no-show bets backfire, by dishing out cash to people prepared to fly later.

Underbooking IS afflicting some package-holiday firms this summer, with pockets of "distressed inventory" around the Med. But the two giant firms, Airtours and Thomson, are already slugging it out on the beaches over next summer. Airtours is attacking its rival's plan to charge extra for airport-to-resort transfers, by taking out advertisements showing an unhappy-looking family by the roadside in Majorca hitching a ride to the resort of Alcudia.

No wonder they're miserable – they're thumbing on the wrong side of the road.

Late news: anyone keen to cheer up with a trip to Rome, meanwhile, can fly there aboard Ethiopian Airlines (020-8987 7000), which shuttles between Heathrow and the Italian capital four times a week for a bargain £168 return, however late you book. No bucket shops nor internet bookings involved – but you must pick up the ticket from its office in Chiswick, west London.

travel@independent.co.uk