recently, i bought a full economy fare on an international flight. When i went to check in, they offered a really cheap upgrade to first. it was a no brainer and i was excited since the flight was gonna be ~6 hours.
i had a rude awakening when i got to the airport. This "first class" ticket was actually more like a premium economy ticket. I didn't get access to the first class check in line, no access to the lounge, no priority boarding, and the seats themselves had no extra bonus other than being in the front of the plane and slightly wider.
it was at that moment i realized there was no beating airlines and good deals aren't really that good unless you got the money to spend.
fsckboy · 4h ago
I have flown "first class" on flights that turned out to be small airplanes and there was not much to the first class distinction, seats only slightly bigger, no special food, etc.
I'm confused a little by what you are saying, are you saying that there was first class boarding but you were not allowed to participate? was there a first class lounge with the name of your airline and you were not allowed to use it? etc.
AlotOfReading · 4h ago
You can beat airlines. Mistake fares and fares sold below cost definitely exist, though they're a lot less common than they used to be as pricing models have improved. You're more likely to see them if you pay attention to off-season and new routes that aren't popular. Severe weather predictions and similar events can also create large price drops. I once got a $20 flight to Hawaii by simply buying just before a typhoon that didn't hit.
quotemstr · 4h ago
What airline?
dboreham · 3h ago
Has to be Iceland Air.
AlotOfReading · 1h ago
I remember Iceland Air being a reasonably nice flag carrier when I was a kid. The pivot into low cost after the financial crisis and competition from WOW air had a lot of negative ramifications.
username135 · 8h ago
Was not expecting to read the whole thing. Very interesting.
Majromax · 7h ago
Was it really interesting? To me, it has certain hallmarks of an AI-generated article. In particular, it introduces the same concept several times, in different sections. For example, fare classes, nested booking, and the SABRE system each get two different introductions.
The content seems legitimate, but I felt like my time was being wasted through at minimum a lack of editing.
andy99 · 6h ago
> To me, it has certain hallmarks of an AI-generated article.
I wondered that too.
I don't want to offend anyone, and have no idea how it was written, and I already know most of this stuff so am not the audience. But respectfully I feel like it had a lot of words for a fairly shallow overview, which feels AI-ish, plus the "delve" at the beginning got my radar up. This is sort of what I expect from Manus or one of those ersatz "research" LLMs. Anyway, it's got lots of upvotes, hopefully people are finding it useful.
(Edit to add: it's actually content marketing for some kind of [questionable, subscribe to access some hidden refund thing] travel company so I don't feel bad criticizing anymore)
PaulHoule · 2h ago
What's funny about it is that even though it follows the instructions your writing instructor gave you to always write a conclusion for your articles (and that probably are the instructions in the prompt for an LLM) it does not follow the instructions that I got from everybody I ever did content marketing with: to always end an article with a "call to action", which is why this article was up for hours before anybody noticed the site it was on.
gsf_emergency_2 · 2h ago
Article can be skipped here.
"Deep-dive" is the call-to-action.
xp84 · 5h ago
"Airlines don't just sell seats - they manage a dynamic inventory of fares, divided into booking classes (fare buckets)"
that "They don't just _____ -- they ________" construction! It's definitely a "once you see it" thing that you start to see constantly in AI-generated content! I wonder why the model loves that so much
htrp · 4h ago
Training on content with parallelism
cptcobalt · 2h ago
I think this is an example of above average but not great AI writing. I still read it to the end because the subject is interesting and there is enough focus (and, seemingly) expertise on the topic.
I think the telltale for me that makes me count as heavily AI-assisted is the lack of inclusion of real, inline examples of actual fares & their restrictions. I know I've seen them broken down before in other content. But not once here was there a full readout of an actual fare bucket & its rules. I think a human writer would have been tempted to include even one of those as an artifact, but an AI as a topic reviewer/summarizer/collator won't unless explicitly instructed.
itake · 7h ago
Yeah, there was a lot of repetitive information which made me lose interest
stronglikedan · 6h ago
Should have passed it through AI for a summary!
bigdict · 4h ago
"delves"
dashes
an explicit "conclusion" section at the end
3eb7988a1663 · 4h ago
Humans do not write conclusions? As someone who went to college, that is a natural way to end a long essay. True mark of higher education would be writing the conclusion at the top.
bigdict · 2h ago
Exactly, it's a natural way to write a college essay. I've never not cringed reading an article/blog post that is structured that way, it comes across very contrived. I've also noticed that LLMs tend to prefer it, and humans tend to avoid it in general.
3eb7988a1663 · 2h ago
For a 500 word blog post, sure it may be a bit much. This article was a decently hefty read, for which the summary callouts are not out of place.
eru · 3h ago
It's called an executive summary in that case, ain't it?
3eb7988a1663 · 3h ago
I was thinking an academic Abstract, but sure.
JSR_FDED · 7h ago
Great overview.
It would seem that the old rule of thumb of booking long in advance to get a cheaper ticket isn’t really relevant anymore?
itake · 6h ago
I didn’t have that take. My understanding is the only time you’re guaranteed to have low-cost ticket availability is when the flight is initially allowing booking.
Later, as more tickets are sold they have more information about the flight and thus they may make adjustments to the ticket pricing. Either opening up more low-cost tickets that were sold at the beginning of the flight or reducing the number of low-cost tickets to meet high demand.
AlotOfReading · 5h ago
It's worth pointing out that the initial fares will be comparatively cheap fare classes, but they may not be the cheapest prices depending on what happens with demand closer to the flight date. You can often get better fares by waiting if you're flexible.
acrooks · 4h ago
I anecdotally find flight prices tend to follow a cosine wave. Starting high, dipping a couple months before, and shooting back up. You can see these sorts of trends on Google Flights which will show historical pricing for your search query.
And it can be helpful if you’re very flexible. If my dates are very strict then I’ll tend to book further in advance, whereas if I have a lot of wiggle room then I’ll wait it out.
CBLT · 4h ago
I worked for an airline fare pricing startup. The key to getting a lower fare is to not be flying for business.
Since airlines can't outright ask you if you're flying business, they'll instead offer tradeoffs that a business flier won't make. So plan in advance, but be flexible in trading off day-of-week or time-of-day.
3eb7988a1663 · 4h ago
What are some tells of a business flight? The only one that comes to my mind: I am doing whatever is possible to fly out on Monday or Friday rather than give up my weekend for the company.
I have always booked corporate flights through an internal portal system. I assumed that this identified me as a belonging to X company, so my options would be priced by some standing agreement with the airline. Is this not true?
CBLT · 3h ago
I'm not the best person to answer, but it's really any price<->X tradeoff, whether that's being able to choose at the last minute, going to your preferred airport in the destination city, or even those other bullshit upcharges airlines have.
dboreham · 3h ago
Crappy routing. Business travelers aren't going to fly from Salt Lake to London via LAX and EWR for example. Airlines will offer wacky routes at lower prices that obviously cost them more in terms of fuel and airframe time, because they know people who value their time (and aren't paying themselves) will not accept them. This is particularly prevalent with award travel. You can try to game their system though -- find a crazy route that you actually want to fly (12h stopover in some city you want to visit), but which the airline's algorithm sees as unappealing.
i had a rude awakening when i got to the airport. This "first class" ticket was actually more like a premium economy ticket. I didn't get access to the first class check in line, no access to the lounge, no priority boarding, and the seats themselves had no extra bonus other than being in the front of the plane and slightly wider.
it was at that moment i realized there was no beating airlines and good deals aren't really that good unless you got the money to spend.
I'm confused a little by what you are saying, are you saying that there was first class boarding but you were not allowed to participate? was there a first class lounge with the name of your airline and you were not allowed to use it? etc.
The content seems legitimate, but I felt like my time was being wasted through at minimum a lack of editing.
I wondered that too.
I don't want to offend anyone, and have no idea how it was written, and I already know most of this stuff so am not the audience. But respectfully I feel like it had a lot of words for a fairly shallow overview, which feels AI-ish, plus the "delve" at the beginning got my radar up. This is sort of what I expect from Manus or one of those ersatz "research" LLMs. Anyway, it's got lots of upvotes, hopefully people are finding it useful.
(Edit to add: it's actually content marketing for some kind of [questionable, subscribe to access some hidden refund thing] travel company so I don't feel bad criticizing anymore)
"Deep-dive" is the call-to-action.
that "They don't just _____ -- they ________" construction! It's definitely a "once you see it" thing that you start to see constantly in AI-generated content! I wonder why the model loves that so much
I think the telltale for me that makes me count as heavily AI-assisted is the lack of inclusion of real, inline examples of actual fares & their restrictions. I know I've seen them broken down before in other content. But not once here was there a full readout of an actual fare bucket & its rules. I think a human writer would have been tempted to include even one of those as an artifact, but an AI as a topic reviewer/summarizer/collator won't unless explicitly instructed.
dashes
an explicit "conclusion" section at the end
It would seem that the old rule of thumb of booking long in advance to get a cheaper ticket isn’t really relevant anymore?
Later, as more tickets are sold they have more information about the flight and thus they may make adjustments to the ticket pricing. Either opening up more low-cost tickets that were sold at the beginning of the flight or reducing the number of low-cost tickets to meet high demand.
And it can be helpful if you’re very flexible. If my dates are very strict then I’ll tend to book further in advance, whereas if I have a lot of wiggle room then I’ll wait it out.
Since airlines can't outright ask you if you're flying business, they'll instead offer tradeoffs that a business flier won't make. So plan in advance, but be flexible in trading off day-of-week or time-of-day.
I have always booked corporate flights through an internal portal system. I assumed that this identified me as a belonging to X company, so my options would be priced by some standing agreement with the airline. Is this not true?