I feel like people are suspending their reasoning in order to maximally shit on airlines in this thread (because yes, they do have a history of predatory pricing practices).
The problem with this isn't the difference in prices - charging less for buying in bulk is a normal thing that's probably been done by merchants since the invention of money.
The problem with this is the lack of communication. There's no advertisement of a bulk/family discount at any point during the pricing process, you just see a different price. That's the problem here, not the price difference itself.
arp242 · 4h ago
I once tried to book a flight with the same-day return; the price for the return flight was mad expensive. The same return flight was a few hundred euros cheaper if you booked the initial flight a day earlier.
My theory is that most same-day travel is for business, and businesses are far less price-sensitive than consumers and will just pay whatever.
I suspect this is what's going on here. Most solo travellers are for business, not consumers for holidays. The price difference here is huge – almost half – which is far beyond a bulk discount, we're talking about 1 person vs 2 people.
That's also why none of this is advertised: it's not a discount, but a "we think you can pay more, so we'll charge you more" type of thing.
Is that a good/bad/ethical/predatory thing? I don't know. Leaves kind of a bad taste for me though.
FabHK · 2h ago
Just in terms of simple economics:
Without price discrimination, there is one price, and then there are two triangles "left" of the price: What consumers would have paid, but don't need to, that's the consumer surplus (between price and demand), and what producers would have sold for, but got more for, that's the producer surplus (between price and supply).
With price discrimination, what happens is that the producers "grab" some of that consumer surplus for themselves (as "price" is not a horizontal line anymore, but gets closer to the demand line).
So this is bad for consumers, good for producers. However, the producers can use the surplus to subsidize products for poorer consumers, so that a higher quantity of goods is sold.
Having said that, the airline market is very weird (oligopoly character, very perishable goods, ...)
Uehreka · 1h ago
I don’t trust that any modern company would actually “use the surplus to subsidize products for poorer consumers”, that sounds like the kind of College Economics fact that isn’t actually true in the real world.
dsr_ · 20m ago
It's the sort of thing that a strong regulator can mandate, but generally doesn't; and the sort of thing that an airline would promote heavily, but not in a way that anyone could rely on: "We donate tickets to Charity X who uses them to fly very sick children to world-class hospitals! Why not donate your airmiles right now, relieving us of some of this obligation without getting the usual tax deduction!"
nradov · 3h ago
At times it has also been common for airlines to charge lower prices for round trip tickets that extend over a Saturday. The thinking being that business travelers usually return home on Thursday or Friday and they're less price sensitive so airlines could use that as a way to discriminate. Leisure travelers typically stayed through a weekend and received lower prices.
arcticbull · 2h ago
> I once tried to book a flight with the same-day return; the price for the return flight was mad expensive. The same return flight was a few hundred euros cheaper if you booked the initial flight a day earlier.
Minimum stay durations, like advance purchase restrictions, are a common part of fare construction.
> That's also why none of this is advertised: it's not a discount, but a "we think you can pay more, so we'll charge you more" type of thing.
A surcharge for X vs a discount for ~X is the same thing, it's just how it's presented.
Technically all of this is advertised, it's published in GDS. People just don't really want to read the fare rules because it's boring and a ton of reading.
jdeibele · 52m ago
I didn't know what a GDS was. Apparently it's a Global Distribution System and there's 4 major ones, including Sabre which I've heard of and 3 that I haven't.
I don't know how a normal person would have access to any of them. They're described as being offered via subscription to businesses.
You can find the fares on expertflyer.com if you're curious but you can also see the fare rules usually during the checkout flow.
[edit] You can probably see them on ITA Matrix too, I can't remember.
jmward01 · 2h ago
The only real question here is why hasn't competition driven this 'discount' away? In a perfect market it shouldn't be possible for this to exist, right? I am not a fan of airlines because, among other reasons, it often appears that demand and competition aren't driving price.
arcticbull · 2h ago
> I am not a fan of airlines because, among other reasons, it often appears that demand and competition aren't driving price.
First off airlines are an extremely low margin business.
AA's net margin is 1.26%, Delta's net margin is 5.91%, United's net margin is 6.43%, Alaska's net margin is 2.86%. These aren't exactly blockbuster SaaS numbers.
Demand and competition absolutely drive price reductions - competitive routes have much lower revenue per available seat mile - and adjusted for inflation air travel is wildly cheaper than it used to be. Since 1995 the cumulative inflation-adjusted price of domestic air travel is down almost 37%. [1] Thanks to competition you can fly from SFO to NYC for $99, non-stop, next month. On the other hand SFO to GUM is $1662 ($1100 on a half round trip basis), because there's no competition.
Airlines with both a domestic and international route network tend to lose money on their domestic routes and make up for it on their flagship international routes, but even still, they make most of their money on frequent flier programs and credit card relationships.
St Louis Fed has a good write-up on the economics of air travel. [2]
It doesn’t seem to be that widespread - mostly being confined to short one way trips. There is no evidence of it happening on international or return flights.
It feels more like a test of a strategy to fill middle seats.
parsimo2010 · 1h ago
> Is that a good/bad/ethical/predatory thing?
It is a natural result of our economic system. Economists call it "extracting consumer surplus," and there are several mechanisms companies employ to get the population to pay them the maximum amount of money. Airlines indeed use the information they have about you and the flight you're booking to guess the maximum amount you'll pay- and that's the price they show you.
Obviously we, as consumers, feel taken advantage of because we wish we could pay less (and keep the surplus to ourselves). But this is going to happen in any capitalist system.
bdcravens · 3h ago
Some companies more or less do the same thing with their "enterprise" software.
yosito · 2h ago
Airline ticket prices have been highly individualized for at least a decade. I live a nomadic lifestyle and I'm often traveling with friends from various countries. We can sit next to each other in the same café and search for the same plane tickets on the same website at the same time, and get entirely different price offers. This is one of the reasons that I never buy plane tickets without using incognito mode or some sort of private browsing, but even doing that affects the price that you're offered.
BurningFrog · 4h ago
As I understand it, prices are generated by algorithms on the spot, and may change any number of times during a day.
You can't advertise prices that constantly change.
listenallyall · 5h ago
All airline pricing is unadvertised and not communicated. They also sell through lots of independent agencies and channels.
It would be weird to specifically advertise this. Unlike say, buying a second pair of shoes - not many people will buy an extra plane ticket to save 30% off both.
fiddlerwoaroof · 3h ago
The thing I find interesting about a lot of things like this is that they feel like a holdover of half the era where negotiating prices was normal: today, for most people in the US, most shopping is just a matter of going somewhere and paying a set price and you don’t argue with the seller to get a better one. B2B transactions still usually involve a negotiation, I think, but it’s basically gone for consumers.
With something like airfares, the business is still doing its half of negotiations: collecting bits of data about the buyer to determine a price; but, crucially, there’s no real way for the buyer to “talk back” and so the process seems arbitrary.
gruez · 1h ago
>The thing I find interesting about a lot of things like this is that they feel like a holdover of half the era where negotiating prices was normal: today, for most people in the US, most shopping is just a matter of going somewhere and paying a set price and you don’t argue with the seller to get a better one. B2B transactions still usually involve a negotiation, I think, but it’s basically gone for consumers.
Not really. The "negotiation" is still there. Time limited discounts weed out consumers who need something immediately. Coupons weed out people who aren't willing to put the legwork to find them. Loyalty programs and app-based offers (eg. McDonalds) take all of this to the next level by sending targeted coupons based on whatever demographic/behavioral information they can glean from you.
jermaustin1 · 5h ago
> not many people will buy an extra plane ticket to save 30% off both.
That was kind of the premise of a movie I watched last night where a couples retreat offered a group discount for 4 couples or something.
So I could see it being "Bring your friends for 30% off!" being a cool summer promotion to beach destinations or something.
delfinom · 4h ago
It's intentional and working as designed.
The same way they have been observed to offer higher prices to iPhone users at times
They come up with schemes to rake in money based on market segmentation they run numbers on and have their booking systems setup in a way to make price comparison "difficult" for a normal user.
postalrat · 5h ago
Are these discounts compared to prices before the change or did they raise the price for individual travelers?
krick · 1h ago
There hardly is such thing as "discounts" in airline pricing. I mean, formally, there is, there's a lot of them, but, well, it's complicated…
In all honesty all this thread is people complaining about something they don't have a clue about. Airline pricing is insanely complicated, and this is for a reason. Airlines are not a luxury business, they barely manage to survive. If not all this dynamic pricing, special contracts with agencies, etc, they'd have to charge so much for a seat that you wouldn't pay and all this travel industry you are accustomed to simply wouldn't exist. The whole business is built on making somebody who crucially needs to fly pay as much, as he can, and then to make price attractive enough for the rest of us so that you can sell the rest of the tickets, so that flight can make any profit. And in the end, margins are super thin in this business.
Also, your question implies that you imagine that there is some simple enough "true price for a seat", which is so far from the truth, you have no idea. If you actually look at the price breakdown for a given ticket, there are literally dozens of components in it. It's not unusual that so called "fare" of a ticket (which is, like, "just price") may be literally $1, and the rest of $300 is various taxes, surcharges and payoffs I won't even try to start to explain here.
I mean, really, people here truly have no idea what they are complaining about. Airline pricing is not a thing you should hate.
SonOfLilit · 5h ago
Are grocery store discounts for six packs compared to prices before the change or did they raise the price of single items?
Here they don't even advertise it as a discount, so there's no ethical problem with raising the individual traveler price by x and lowering the family price by y so that the total profit remains the same.
MentatOnMelange · 4h ago
There is absolutely an ethical problem with charging people different prices for the same exact product/service
JumpCrisscross · 3h ago
> There is absolutely an ethical problem with charging people different prices for the same exact product/service
One, there isn’t. One party undercutting another for the same product is how competition generates consumer surplus.
Two, it isn’t the same product. When I fly with my family, we check in together. We board together. I collect their docs on my phone and double check they have them on theirs. I turn down upgrades so I can sit with them. If there is a change, it takes one customer service agent maybe 10% longer to adjust everyone in bulk. I’m not incurring 4 or 5x the cost on the airline for 4 to 5x the revenue, this is why bulk discounting exists for everything.
This isn’t an ethical problem. If it’s triggering an ethical system, that’s more damning for the system than for Delta. This is a communication and brand problem.
fireflash38 · 1h ago
Mm, it feels unfair. I was trying to reason through why I think it's an ethical problem and that's what I've come up with. You're not treating people equally - whether it's in person bartering where you make assumptions about them based on snap judgements or via airlines seen here.
There's an even bigger fairness issue when there's such a huge data knowledge gap between the parties, both knowing that there is this hidden price structure as well as knowing a ton about you. So there's privacy implications too.
Edit: it's not undercutting. It's price discrimination. You know the thing people fucking hate when trying to buy a car. Half the reason people liked buying Tesla is cause the price is the price is the price.
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
> It's price discrimination. You know the thing people fucking hate when trying to buy a car
Transparent pricing worked as a positive differentiator for cars. (Saturn. Tesla.)
I believe airlines have tried their hand at it. But it doesn’t budge the needle. If there is a single enduring truth to at least American airline demand, it’s that most consumers will pick the cheapest ticket. Almost nothing else matters, when it comes time to pay for it, to almost all of the flying public.
stmw · 7h ago
Here is why I think these kinds of dynamic pricing practices are bad: it may be perfectly fair and legal, but it forces a non-negligible number of humanity to waste time and/or energy to figure out if it's happening, how to work around it if it is, and just generally waste human potential on something that should be a simple commodity.
yadaeno · 7h ago
Same with points systems. Why am I forced to understand your made up currency and status system to get the full value of my money.
There might be some benefits to price discrimination (which is in effect what a point systems achieves) but the collective time wasted dicking around with points isn’t worth it. Make all point systems illegal.
zeroonetwothree · 3h ago
To get full value of your money takes time and information in every market. It’s not unique to this space.
If you want to buy anything and just pick the first option then you probably will have worse results than someone that did research. Or someone that used coupons. Or someone that waited for a sale. Or someone that bought used. Etc etc
We obviously shouldn’t make all those behaviors illegal. There is an inherent time/money trade off in life. It’s actually the whole basis for economic activity (ie it’s why employers are able to pay you to do stuff for them) so stopping it would probably be quite bad.
AnthonyMouse · 3h ago
In general markets are pretty good at arbitrage. If you can get a $50 discount for a product by doing X, someone is going to set up a service whereby they do X for you, resell the product for a $45 discount and put $5 in their own pocket. At which point nobody would pay full price to the original seller and the convenience fee for not doing it yourself is $5 instead of $50.
The problem comes when the original seller doesn't want their price discrimination scheme to be thwarted by efficiency-improving arbitrageurs and takes measures to prevent that, because that's rent-seeking behavior and shouldn't be tolerated.
schiffern · 2h ago
Being the status quo doesn't change that it's an inefficient waste of resources. That's still true.
The airline wastes resources on their end, and so do the consumers. They're both doing what they're incentivized to do, but that's not what's actually efficient for society. The whole point of a good economy is that these two are always pulled into alignment (Efficient Market Hypothesis), but ours has failed in this case.
It was fascinating to chat with the software engineers at ITA Software.[0] Turns out flight routing (which everyone knows "should be" just a simple A*) is actually NP-Hard because of how convoluted the airline pricing systems are. At that company it was obviously a group of super smart people solving super hard problems..... and for what?
This is Kurt Vonnegut Jr's "Dynamic tension": muscles working against muscles, with no work being done. This is what Bullshit Jobs (good title, disappointing book) should have been written about.
To quote Eisenhower, this (lesser) scourge also
signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
Maybe an outright ban isn't the best intervention (and maybe it is), but I'm certain denial of the underlying problem will yield us zero progress.
They also have the poorest who have cheap credit cards subsidize the richest who have the best cards and receive most of the rewards. The inequality is baked into the system.
Which is adjacent to: Nearly everyone loses, because the house knows the odds and controls the terms and conditions of the rewards.
JoshTriplett · 3h ago
> They also have the poorest who have cheap credit cards subsidize the richest who have the best cards and receive most of the rewards.
Right. This isn't about interchange fees. But you're right I wasn't clear. It's the points/rewards/miles systems that are.
JoshTriplett · 1h ago
You talked about "the poorest who have cheap credit cards subsidize the richest who have the best cards". The point of the thread I cited is that in general credit cards make money from both poor and rich people alike, and make more money from rich people, and neither one is subsidizing the other in any framing of it. It doesn't matter whether you're talking points, miles, or any other form of rewards; there's no degree to which credit card reward programs have anyone subsidizing anyone else.
amrocha · 2h ago
It’s not false. Patrick disagrees with it. The atlantic doesn’t. The general consensus is with the Atlantic, but it’s not a clear cut subject.
JoshTriplett · 1h ago
You are interpreting "demonstrates to be false by citing sources and providing evidence" with "disagrees with". The thread I linked to is an instance of the former, not the latter. See the citations and graphs from that thread, showing the data that credit card companies make much more money from wealthy people than they do from poor people, and neither one is subsidizing the other.
If you're going to claim "the general consensus", [citation needed]. A more likely claim is "more people have read the misinformation from the Atlantic than have read the correct refutation from a domain expert on credit cards", which is sadly probably true.
amrocha · 1h ago
I don’t know why you’d trust the guy that works for a credit card processor telling you that credit cards are fair, actually.
And Twitter doesn’t show threads unless you’re logged in btw, so you just linked Patrick’s opinion.
JoshTriplett · 1h ago
This is not an argument from authority (though I would in fact give some credence to a domain expert with a demonstrated reputation for diligence and accuracy, here). This is an argument backed by evidence refuting an article not supported by evidence.
(Also, the argument is not "credit cards are fair". The argument is "credit card reward programs are not a subsidy of the rich by the poor".)
> And Twitter doesn’t show threads unless you’re logged in btw, so you just linked Patrick’s opinion.
Fair point, thank you.
Some highlights of the thread, assuming that each directly linked tweet can be loaded:
I don't find the thread convincing. The "standard" argument is that grocery stores bake in a 2% (or whatever) interchange rate into their prices, but only rich people get 1% (or whatever) back in cash back, whereas poor people don't. As a result, poor people are paying 1% higher prices on goods compared to rich people.
Patrick doesn't really dispute this, but tries to argue that this doesn't matter because rich people pay more in absolute terms, so they're not getting "subsidized". Maybe this is just word lawyering over what "subsidize" means, but most people would characterize this arrangement as at least "unfair", even though rich people are paying more in absolute terms.
He also points to some graphs about how from the point of the view of card issuers, the middle customers are actually the ones being subsidized, not the rich or the poor. That might be true, but is totally unrelated to the original original point, which is about what effective price (ie. price paid - cashback) consumers are getting at shops. Moreover, the fact that they're getting a subsidy from the card issuer doesn't preclude from them getting a subsidy from the store itself.
JoshTriplett · 46m ago
> The "standard" argument is that grocery stores bake in a 2% (or whatever) interchange rate into their prices, but only rich people get 1% (or whatever) back in cash back, whereas poor people don't. As a result, poor people are paying 1% higher prices on goods compared to rich people.
And the thread counters that in several ways: rich people spend more in total at the store so their interchange costs are more than made up for by actual spending; and poor people are getting different rewards in exchange for the interchange system, such as free checking/banking (which was made free by using interchange fees to subsidize it so there aren't monthly fees).
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the financial system overall is particularly fair. If you want cases where it's extremely unfair, a target-rich environment would be bank accounts that have fees that just so happen to disproportionately affect poorer people (e.g. overdraft fees).
But credit card reward programs aren't a case of transferring money from poor individual cardholders to rich individual cardholders; credit cards are a case of transferring money from poor and "rich" cardholders to ultra-rich credit card companies. The right target for the ire, there, is the credit card company, not the "rich" individual cardholders. This is a standard divide-and-conquer tactic: better to pit low-income and high-income people against each other, rather than cast attentions on the very large companies that have constructed a system to profit heavily from both of them.
ghaff · 4h ago
The richest pay for the best cards and presumably buy enough appropriate goods to make the best cards worthwhile.
ncruces · 6h ago
> Why am I forced to understand your made up currency and status system to get the full value of my money.
You're not forced. This allows them to make extra money from people who don't bother, and offer discounts to price conscious people.
Time is money. Convenience too.
amrocha · 2h ago
They make extra money from fools thinking they can beat the system, not from the people that avoid it.
If points systems caused losses then nobody would have them. They’re money makers, and that money is coming from someone’s pocket.
fn-mote · 2h ago
> If points systems caused losses then nobody would have them. They’re money makers, and that money is coming from someone’s pocket.
It sounds like you believe the losses are coming from the people who _have_ the points? That doesn't seem likely to me.
It would be a better analysis to say "it's complicated" -
* Business travelers earn personally-owned points on their company spending. In this case, the company might be paying higher prices but the individual is being incentivized to continue that because the miles are essentially a kickback.
* Personal travelers have an incentive to travel with the same airline for more points, so a kind of lock-in for either (1) those who are not as sensitive to price differences or: (2) those for whom the benefits of the points are high enough to outweigh some higher costs acquiring them.
* In the same vein, a points system that encourages a traveler to stay with the same airline can give _that airline_ greater profits from _that consumer_, even if on a per-flight basis the airline might hypothetically be making less. It's like Costco selling stuff for a cheaper unit price.
amrocha · 1h ago
We could argue about the monetary value of points, but I don’t think we would get anywhere.
Instead I’d rather focus on human nature and induced behaviour.
When mcdonald's offers 2 burgers for the price of one, they make money because people who wouldn’t normally eat at mcdonald’s show up.
When airlines offer points, they make money because people who normally wouldn’t book flights end up booking them. Even if the points are a good deal, you end up spending more money than you normally would because you’re enticed by the points.
cassianoleal · 4h ago
I think you missed the last bit of GP's sentence (even though you quoted it literally on your own):
> to get the full value of my money.
No one is forced to understand the system, but that means leaving some indeterminate amount of money/value in the hands of the predatory airline.
ncruces · 4h ago
I didn't.
If you wanna save money, you figure it out. If you don't wanna figure it out, you leave money on the table.
They're selling (negative) convenience, but that's pretty much by design.
bbarnett · 7h ago
The entire point behind reward cards, is to track every purchase you make. They're the original evil tracking device, so the airline makes money with those points.
They do it by selling data, by points expiring, and by often only allowing points when seats would be empty otherwise.
And often retailers pay more at POS terminals!
This all ties into any rewards program. It's part of the package, even if points are granted for use.
margalabargala · 6h ago
> And often retailers pay more at POS terminals!
This is really the whole point. The sale of data is much less lucrative than the purchases by the customers themselves, especially for the "nicer" cards.
If you are a CC company with wealthy clientele, they tend to spend more. This means that retailers are willing to offer deals/rewards to attract those clients, and also that you want to offer rewards to keep those clients.
This is why e.g. American Express has cards with great rewards, high annual card fees to keep the riffraff away, and retailers willing to take a larger % cut in order to have those cardholders shop at their store where they presumably purchase more.
arcticbull · 1h ago
> This is why e.g. American Express has cards with great rewards, high annual card fees to keep the riffraff away, and retailers willing to take a larger % cut in order to have those cardholders shop at their store where they presumably purchase more.
At the high end it actually diminishes. Rewards cards targeting middle of the distribution are more lucrative, generally. Citi Double Cash gets you 2% cash back on purchases whereas the Amex Platinum gets you 1X on all spend worth at most 1.25% (and 5X on airfare).
JumpCrisscross · 3h ago
> high annual card fees to keep the riffraff away
It’s more a sunk cost/commitment thing. Their approvals department keeps away low and inconsistent spenders.
Evil tracking is half of it, but the nominal "loyalty" benefit is there too. If I have a bunch of points with one company, I'm likely to accept a slightly worse deal from them relative to a competitor where I have none in the hope that I'll acquire enough for an award.
Retric · 6h ago
Non rewards credit cards also track purchases. It’s a revenue stream few companies are just going to leave sitting around.
twoodfin · 4h ago
Why is anyone forced to reverse engineer the pricing scheme? Simply decide if the ticket is worth the money to you. You typically have other airlines to compare to, other fares on the same airline for different itineraries, and other modes of transit entirely.
Just because some people won’t buy anything that isn’t on a coupon doesn’t mean coupons are bad.
alaxhn · 3h ago
> Why is anyone forced to reverse engineer the pricing scheme?
Because you can save money by getting a cheaper flight by understanding how pricing works and adapting your purchasing strategy. Many consumer are willing to spend time and effort getting a better deal.
twoodfin · 3h ago
Again, not seeing the “forcing” in that choice of time and effort.
AnthonyMouse · 3h ago
The thing you're being forced to do is to choose between paying the higher price without screwing around and screwing around in order to pay the lower price, because the option to pay the lower price without screwing around was taken away.
This can be true even if the lower price is nominally a discount. Before everybody would pay $100. Now you can pay $80 by screwing around but have to pay $150 otherwise, and the screwing around is $40 worth of inconvenience. $40 is less than the $70 difference between $80 and $150, but $80 plus a $40 inconvenience is a higher cost than the original $100 uniform price, and obviously so is $150.
threeseed · 3h ago
Because lack of transparency in pricing affects competition.
Which is bad for consumers and the broader economy.
Spooky23 · 4h ago
You can pretty easily get a good airline price by following a few best practices. If you are a person who wants the best deal, you grind for it.
It’s no different than clipping coupons or waiting till closing time to get pastries at a discount.
NegativeLatency · 7h ago
Especially when your industry is so "critical" that it has repeatedly received bailouts from the government.
WalterBright · 6h ago
Airfares were much more expensive when the government regulated them.
singleshot_ · 4h ago
You get what you pay for.
devilbunny · 1h ago
In the US, government-regulated fares meant that fares were basically static on a given route. The only way to bring passengers to your airline was to serve places nobody else did, or to offer extras that slightly offset your profit in the hope that you'd get more, regular customers.
Since air travel was substantially more expensive then than now, the amenities gravitated to what attracted the most frequent fliers: businessmen. So stewardesses (they certainly weren't called flight attendants then) had weight limits, age limits, and if-you're-married-you-must-quit deals, and as a glance at some 1970s uniforms will show you, they were basically hiring models who happened to have the right skill set (usually at least one would be a trained nurse, and they all had to be reasonably confident) to dress them in revealing outfits. Like Hooters for travel.
If that's what you want, great. If you'd prefer other amenities... maybe not.
It has never struck me as coincidental that smoking was banned on US aircraft before no-smoking policies became nigh-universal at restaurants, but in just about the right timeframe for airplanes to shift from a boys' club to a place that catered to families.
If you want to pay more to get more, there are a lot of options, starting with coach plus (coach seats, business class legroom, priority boarding) and going through first class before branching out into niches like all-first-class flights (JSX is an airline in the US for which this is the business model; they fly smaller regional-size planes, and the reduced capacity legally allows them to skip the whole TSA and terminal experience and just let you on the plane if you show up and buy a ticket twenty minutes before departure) and then on into the various levels of chartered and truly private aviation.
You do, definitely, get what you pay for, but sometimes you don't need a Michelin-starred meal experience. And when that's the case, you've got cheaper options that didn't exist before deregulation (except for Southwest, which avoided problems by not making interstate flights at all in the early days.
WalterBright · 2h ago
Not with price controls.
_heimdall · 7h ago
Are you referring to bailouts for airline operators or Boeing?
ghaff · 4h ago
We can debate seat pitch I guess but economy seating hasn't been great for decades and something like United Polaris is better than Pan Am first class ever was even if food is arguably a downgrade.
brian_herman · 7h ago
Both
_heimdall · 6h ago
Boeing is, for better or worse, pretty critical to our military. I'm not sure why they'd consider any one airline company critical though.
stackskipton · 6h ago
Because most airlines have become monopolies at their respective hubs so their loss would severely inconvenience a ton of people so government is encouraged to prop them up.
For example, if Delta went under, Atlanta, Detroit and Salt Lake City would lose a total of 50%+ of their flights. That would be absolutely devastating.
JoshTriplett · 3h ago
If Delta went under, one or more airlines would rapidly go "hey, there's a proven demand that's suddenly unmet", and there would very quickly be replacement flights.
_heimdall · 5h ago
Devastating to individuals sure. I hold a pretty high bar when it comes to something being truly critical enough for the government to bailout, economic concerns never meet that bar for me.
If we allowed markets to become monopolized we have to deal with that when the bill comes due rather than kick the can down the road.
SoftTalker · 5h ago
If Delta went under another carrier would buy their planes and gate access at those airports, it might be chaotic for a short time but if there is enough demand to fly from point A to point B someone will provide the flights.
Is that accounting for things like bag fees and “fuel surcharges” that used to be in the ticket price?
arcticbull · 1h ago
Fuel surcharges are generally accounted for as part of the fare on revenue tickets, they're a way of extracting additional revenue on award tickets. However, all the major US rewards programs don't charge fuel surcharges anymore. Air Canada gave up on it too. The only one of note is Alaska and American redemptions on British Airways.
On domestic tickets there's no YQ, YR or embedded Q surcharges anyways.
Domestic airfare in the US is down 36% adjusted for inflation since 1995. [1]
Even base tier status concentrated flying with any one carriers get you a waived checked bag, and so does pretty much any airline credit card. So basically you shouldn't pay more than $95 a year in checked baggage fees.
US airlines generally have sub-5% net margins which is why they find themselves in creditor protection every decade or so when the market turns. There's a long-running adage about investing in airlines.
Which doesn't contradict what I wrote. I daresay a lot of families who travel once a year at Christmas pay bag fees for their big bags. Lots of people who travel on a regular basis don't. And a lot of it seems to be on discount airlines. (Which I admittedly never fly.)
amrocha · 2h ago
It actually literally contradicts what you said. People flying any amount (at christmas with their family) are paying bag fees.
arcticbull · 1h ago
US airlines recorded $5.1 billion in checked baggage fees according to your article. US airlines recorded a revenue of $275.3B in 2024. This accounts for 1.8% of revenue. A further billion was change fees.
Net profit was $6.7B meaning literally all of their net revenue (a total of 2.25% of gross revenue) was accounted for from these ancillary fees.
But their inflation-adjusted cost went down 36% since 1995.
There were a total of about 1 billion emplanements by US carriers in 2024, ish, so we're talking about a total of about $6 per passenger per year. They really are insignificant.
akudha · 7h ago
Also, just because something is legal, doesn’t make it ethical, moral or fair. It is just that, legal
sciencesama · 6h ago
And groceries are planning a similar strategy!!
krick · 2h ago
Uh… It's not that you are wrong, but then you can also just abbreviate it to "capitalism is bad, because <…> it forces a non-negligible number of humanity [like all of it] to waste time and/or energy <…> and just generally waste human potential on something that should be a simple commodity"
I mean, yeah, sure. Capitalism is totally stupid and wasteful and evil. Any proposals? Oh wait, no, I'm afraid I don't really want to hear any proposals on this subject. I sincerely wish we don't have to live in interesting times. (Alas, I'm afraid it's past the point we could wish that anyway, so…)
listenallyall · 6h ago
Flights are definitely not a "simple commodity"
listenallyall · 3h ago
Lol, downvotes.
One flight will get you to your sister's wedding on time. The other won't. They don't have equivalent value, they can't be freely exchanged.
burnt-resistor · 4h ago
Either the DOT or FTC should require that all airlines charge the same price for the same class of service on the same flight. Allowing this to continue is just a normalized, predatory, dishonest, unethical scam under the guise of "capitalism".
paulgb · 9h ago
I think this is fair play, they can charge how they want (within reason) and it’s not too different than other bulk discounts.
But someone should totally make a site for finding strangers to book the same flight with :)
mobilemidget · 6h ago
I personally think it's fair if they charge by weight. The post office does it, why not airlines?
Fernicia · 3h ago
Unsurprisingly airlines imposing a fat tax is not an optimal marketing strategy.
m463 · 5h ago
You mean mass.
Otherwise I would buy seats for my personal helium balloons on either side of me.
singleshot_ · 4h ago
Are you at all concerned the airlines will remove the air from the cabin if you try this, just to emphasize that you’re not going to get a refund this way?
Anyway I’ll be across the aisle with hydrogen balloons paying less than you either way. Enjoy your flight!
phinnaeus · 3h ago
I’ll be up in first class with my negative mass doppelgänger who travels with me so we both get a free flight.
histriosum · 4h ago
And I think that you may mean volume.. :-)
AStonesThrow · 3h ago
Mass and volume both count, in an aircraft, don't they? And many oversize humans present logistical and safety challenges:
- Taking up more than one seat with girth, needing a seatbelt extender.
- Fitting through narrow passages, tight turns, limited headroom
- An unconscious person may need to be lifted, and transported somehow
- Toilets and life vests and other safety equipment, rated for your "standard average man size"
- Total mass of passengers/cargo, and its distribution on the aircraft itself
Elevators in the US have a maximum weight and maximum occupancy rating.
Arguably, if obesity is a disability, then appeal to the Americans with Disability Act or similar regulations, but from a standpoint of safety and the common good, it does not seem unreasonable for airlines to charge extra to cover their expenses above.
carabiner · 6h ago
What if larger sizes of clothes were priced higher, since they use more material? I wear a small in almost every case so wouldn't affect me, but man it'd be nerve wracking for a lot of Americans.
autumnstwilight · 3h ago
In most cases the cost of fabric itself is a pretty minor part of the garment price- you're paying for someone to design the clothes, assemble them, ship them, and operate a store that sells them, and those costs are pretty much the same for small and large sizes. Adjusting the price based on the amount of fabric used would probably end up being a dollar or so for the things most people wear on a daily basis.
Unusually large or small sizes can end up more expensive (and/or only manufactured in limited quantities) because they're not commonly bought and they take up space on the shop floor and in inventory which could be used for things with higher turnover. (Edit: Also at the extreme ends of sizing simply enlarging or shrinking the pattern won't work well, you have to redraft it so it sits correctly on a petite or plus-sized frame).
owlbite · 5h ago
They already are?
ghaff · 2h ago
Mostly they don't.
m463 · 5h ago
lol. Having done the laundry, I think women's clothing has significantly higher cost:weight ratio.
rabiescow · 4h ago
if you are very tall they charge a lot extra for having tall sizes... what are you talking about??
anal_reactor · 6h ago
Moral argument: it's a sexist strategy. Yet another situation where men pay more and get worse service.
Economic argument: fat people are more likely to make use of on-board food service despite high markup, so you want as many of them as possible.
spauldo · 1h ago
Speaking as a fat person, air travel is horrible and I'll happily drive a couple thousand miles to avoid flying.
On a flight to Greenland I spent six hours smashed up between the window and a stranger (constant, sweaty, skin-on-skin contact) because they put three fat guys right next to each other on a full flight. I'd rather have taken a couple months of vacation and ridden the icebreaker in.
paxys · 8h ago
Any amount of premium is worth not having a random stranger on your itinerary.
smeej · 7h ago
You're going to end up sitting next to a stranger anyway if you're flying alone. Nobody says you have to become friends, but I wouldn't mind having in common with my seatmate that we're both the kind of people who don't take the standard option at face value.
brailsafe · 7h ago
I've always thought there's a difference between who you book with and who's on your itinerary. Very rarely do I say I'm traveling with anyone unless we're staying in the same room. I guess these fares do specifically state that, but I have a very hard time imagining anyone at the gate would care, they're typically doing the bare minimum as they should.
vladimirralev · 6h ago
A company can figure out the premium and just average it out across the pax who book thru them. Further they could risk-manage no-shows or other bad behaviour based on ratings and feedback. It's just wasting everybody's time to go thru intermediaries.
guhidalg · 8h ago
Do they have to show up? What is the carrier policy on travelers that “miss their uber”?
lapetitejort · 7h ago
No they don't, but they paid for a ticket, and any insurance amount is probably more than the discount of flying in a group.
xandrius · 6h ago
Imagine realising that everyone on Earth you don't know is a random stranger with that mentality, even surrounding you on a non-private flight.
bbarnett · 7h ago
Hi it's John! Is that you, Steve?
bobro · 7h ago
Why?
paxys · 7h ago
Because they may change their plans. They could be a no-show (which will affect your return flight). They could call and change the flight without your knowledge. They could add extras to the trip and charge it to your card.
People are flaky, and being on the same itinerary with the same PNR as someone else means your trip is in their hands.
w29UiIm2Xz · 7h ago
Some sort of service that sat on top of bookings would have its own set of terms and conditions that you agree to, which would at least disincentivize them from acting against your interest.
josephcsible · 7h ago
I can foresee that backfiring when you miss your connection and end up having to stay somewhere unexpected overnight, and then the airline will only pay for one room for both of you.
sircastor · 6h ago
Traveling together does not imply that you're rooming together. It's probably a bit of a fight with the airline to get them to pay for it, but then everything is a bit of a fight with the Airline.
JKCalhoun · 6h ago
Sounds like the pretext for the opening of a great film.
pinkmuffinere · 8h ago
lol I love that concept! Replying here so that I’m reminded of the idea in case I get the time
akudha · 6h ago
That would be a useful and funny site
6stringmerc · 8h ago
Ride-Along Roulette
agosnell · 8h ago
AirUandMe
kayge · 7h ago
OnlyPlanes
geverett · 8h ago
Tbh this makes perfect sense. As someone who worked in airline revenue management for 11 years, it always seemed a little odd that the sales tactics people use everywhere else - group discounts, BOGO, etc - weren't being used by airlines (yes, group bookings could often get discounts, but usually for much larger groups).
What's remarkable here is that airlines waited this long to do it. Sad news for me as a usually solo traveler who prizes flexibility, but I understand airlines wanting to prioritize groups and more locked-in fares.
mysterypie · 8h ago
> As someone who worked in airline revenue management, it always seemed odd that the sales tactics people use everywhere else weren't being used by airlines
Remember the really old days when air miles were awarded solely by distance flown rather than by dollars paid? This made no business sense. It meant that someone who flew the cheapest tickets could rack up as many points as a last-minute first class business traveller who spent massively more ticket.
With the airlines I’m familiar with, it seems that pricing anomaly has been corrected. Air miles are much more correlated with the price of the ticket these days. Eg., you don’t even get air miles on the cheapest tickets on one airline I know.
But I still wonder why the airline industry created an air miles formula so disconnected from the value of the passenger in the early days.
nocoiner · 6h ago
The first mileage program was introduced only a couple years after deregulation, so it probably made a lot more sense at the time as a rough proxy for revenue, and revenue management at the airlines wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as it is today.
bronson · 7h ago
Because of the difference between:
"Congratulations! You flew 100,000 miles with us!"
"Congratulations! You spent $100,000 with us!"
zeroonetwothree · 3h ago
Alaska still uses miles flown. It’s pretty annoying since I’m doing some short hop flights with them that cost a lot and I get basically nothing for it.
I actually prefer the miles per $ model since it seems more fair for everyone. Obviously it’s less exploitable but that’s exactly the sort of thing everyone is complaining about.
listenallyall · 5h ago
In the early days you didn't have the internet where people would share every tiny anomaly, allowing thousands of people to exploit them. Even then, you had a few people realize they could do mileage runs, but it was considered additional revenue and the perks of doing so weren't valued nearly as highly as they are today.
_heimdall · 7h ago
I usually expect to see BOGOs, group discounts, etc advertised. If airlines showed the seat price along with a group discount I don't think people would have a problem with the price difference.
magicalhippo · 4h ago
When I'm in the store and I see 3 for 2 or whatever, I can think, yeah, ok, I'll be using three of 'em soon enough, fine I'll get 3.
But when I travel, it's not like I'm gonna call up my buddy and ask him if he'll join me on a flight so I can get a better ticket price. And if I'm going on vacation with my family, I'm not going to buy individual tickets, like why would I do that?
listenallyall · 5h ago
There are lots of things airlines could offer, that they don't. They are all obsessed with "loyalty", why not sell travelers multi-packs (6 flights over the next 12 months) or subscription-like plans? Why a 24-hour cancellation period even for flights booked months ahead... they could certainly extend that to allow for "low-risk" booking or even charging a small fee for the right to cancel up to, say, 3 months in advance. Auctioning off unsold seats. Selling itineraries with multi-day layovers in a 3rd city (basically adding a second destination to a vacation). Lots more with a bit of creativity.
phil21 · 4h ago
Airlines do sell multi-packs with flexible rebooking. At least United and Delta did pre-covid, I haven’t had a use since then though.
With even moderate airline status rebooking/cancellations work more or less as described. I can’t recall the last time I haven’t been credited for a flight I ended up not taking, even I did a full on no-show.
Without status airlines sell refundable tickets with similar flexible rules, but I assume there is some adverse selection included in how they need to price those fares.
zeroonetwothree · 3h ago
Alaska offers a subscription plan.
Realistically most frequent travelers go for business and they don’t care about cost that much so subscription packs wouldn’t be valuable. That’s why loyalty programs instead offer non monetary perks or those that accrue to the individual (points).
ghaff · 4h ago
United these days has AFAIK pretty generous cancellation though it's in credit rather than outright refund.
listenallyall · 5m ago
Yes, most domestic US airlines have eliminated change fees. But as you point out, it's not possible to get your money back and it's not easy to make changes if you don't have an alternative trip in mind. Cancellability is valuable (see hotel bookings), and yet, people over-value the option - sometimes out of laziness, or they forgot, or they go with the original plan. I have difficulty believing airlines would lose very much if they offered full refundability up to about 3 or 4 months in advance, but they would probably get more bookings, most of which would likely not get cancelled.
sfifs · 4h ago
I've seen most of these in Asia. There's a lot of experiments going on.
listenallyall · 11m ago
Agreed. I participated in a points-based package that used to be offered by AirAsia. It was about $300 for 30 points. Flights between cities/countries were 1 to 3 points each, I probably got 3x my money's worth and still had about 4 or 5 points left over.
dbuxton · 8h ago
I find it weird that this is news and not:
- That it's still way cheaper in most instances to book a return (especially where the "trip" straddles a weekend) rather than a one-way fare when travelling long haul - even if you just throw away the return flight.
- That you can sometimes get access to totally different inventory by booking a package including accommodation, even if that accommodation is one night in a shared dormitory in a hostel (which you just don't go to).
At least group discounts have a recognizable economic rationale. But in these examples you are getting a strict superset of the same SKU (OK, maybe the change rules might be a little tighter, but not in a way that's perceptible) for less money.
arprocter · 4h ago
I've definitely come across the one-way flight costing more than a return
My guess is the airlines think one-way people are business folks (so the price doesn't matter because it's getting expensed), whereas return travelers are paying their own way
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
I vaguely remember London subsidising tourist flights. That would require knowing when the tourist arrived and left.
Matheus28 · 6h ago
Do you have any examples of a one way direct being more expensive than a round trip, with both of them sharing the same outgoing flight?
avidiax · 5h ago
I had this a year ago on ZRH->SFO.
One way business 6,032 Swiss francs.
Round trip business (with a return 6 months later) was 2,530 Swiss francs. So I screenshotted the horrible one-way price to go in my expense report, and then booked the round trip ticket.
histriosum · 4h ago
> So I screenshotted the horrible one-way price to go in my expense report, and then booked the round trip ticket.
So… you committed fraud? Cool?
I’m all for sticking it to the corporate overlords, but careful how far out you stick your neck.
avidiax · 3h ago
No, I was meant to book a one-way ticket, since I was moving offices. But I had to have evidence to show that booking round-trip was cheaper in case anyone questioned why I had purchased round-trip instead of one-way.
anonymars · 5h ago
Try London to Washington, DC and watch your eyes pop
You might be able to find an airline where it doesn't happen, but you will definitely find airlines where it does. Just verified with Delta and British airways and Lufthansa
dataflow · 4h ago
If you're not seeing them you're probably looking at domestic or nearby routes. Try transatlantic.
ghaff · 4h ago
US to Europe open jaw can be weird. I've done somewhat crazy return to origin European city (typically Heathrow) to avoid. And then I've had times when it's been perfectly reasonable.
zeroonetwothree · 3h ago
It’s not uncommon with flights to Europe. I believe within the US it doesn’t happen though.
akudha · 7h ago
Isn’t it a waste to book accommodation and not use it? If it is a popular place, maybe they’ll give it to walkins or something, but otherwise?
mbrameld · 7h ago
Isn't it a waste to spend more for a flight when you could get the same flight for less if you also booked an accommodation you don't plan to use?
akudha · 7h ago
I meant the accommodation going to waste (unused), which could be used by someone else.
But yes, in terms of money, it sure is waste to pay more for the flight.
xp84 · 49m ago
Don’t forget they oversell flights anyway – it’s very likely someone else will use it even if you simply don’t show instead of canceling the ticket.
mgraczyk · 6h ago
My home is empty nearly 70% of the time. Surely that is more wasteful than not using a dorm bed once per year
decimalenough · 7h ago
Singapore Airlines has been doing (used to do?) do this for ages: "GV2" was a Great Value fare for 2 people, "GV4" for 4.
I also don't find this particularly outrageous. Lots of companies do volume discounts, and traveling as a family gets very expensive very fast.
Finally, the fare bucket system used to price flights usually works the other way to penalize groups. If there's 3 seats left in the cheapest bucket, and you try to book for 4, you don't get 3 cheapest plus 1 more expensive, your entire group gets priced at the more expensive bucket.
omosubi · 9h ago
I don't have any data, but it wouldn't at all surprise me if single/business travelers are way more likely to cancel or change flights, and this is just pricing that into the ticket cost.
ghaff · 8h ago
I'm skeptical. Not sure why as a solo traveler I'd be more likely to cancel than a family vacation. If anything, more can go wrong in the case of the latter.
Business traveler maybe. Not my money and business stuff happens. (Usually they want you to book non-refundable because it comes out ahead in the end.)
Tade0 · 8h ago
> If anything, more can go wrong in the case of the latter.
Which is why the people involved take good care to prevent anything from getting in the way of those plans.
If you miss your flight when travelling solo, you disappoint only yourself. With a family the number of disappointed people increases accordingly.
dataflow · 4h ago
Canceled flight is not canceled trip. For refundable trips at least, solo travelers are more likely to cancel and book another flight. Source: done this myself.
joezydeco · 8h ago
I've flown a good number of transatlantic routes with my family, and I've also flown over alone.
From my anecdata, being single greatly increases your chances of being bumped off a full flight. And it's a lot cheaper and easier to compensate/redirect one person than a family of four.
sidewndr46 · 8h ago
You aren't really "bumped". They are legally allowed to oversell the plane. You were never getting on the plane in the first place. They just use weasel wording language like the flight being "full" when they communicate it
I did once have an airline offer me something like $1500 USD and 50,000 bonus miles if I was willing to cancel my flight, but that was days in advance.
nfriedly · 7h ago
> You were never getting on the plane in the first place.
I'm not sure that's true. The airlines are gambling that at least one person will miss the flight for whatever reason, and they'll get away with overbooking.
But, of course, when they loose that gamble, it's really a passenger that looses. The house always wins.
free652 · 6h ago
> You were never getting on the plane in the first place.
Not always the case, you could be physically removed from the plane because the flight is full:
I suspect they also empirically have less price-sensitivity on average, for a variety of reasons
freehorse · 8h ago
Changing/cancelling flights is not usually for free.
sidewndr46 · 8h ago
I did it for free once, but I think the airline was just bad at math. I flew most of the legs of my flight. Then the last leg a hurricane showed up and they offered me an opportunity to rebook since it was likely to cancel the flight.
When I rebooked, the airline gave me a credit for the round trip flight in total. I only had to book a one way ticket on the last leg, so I obviously was able to "afford" the flight without additional expenditure on my part.
derac · 8h ago
Yes, it's already baked in. A cancellable ticket is more expensive.
brigade · 8h ago
Less than 20% of legacy carrier tickets are basic economy, and even ULCCs don’t always charge a fee anymore. So by numbers, it is usually for free.
wallunit · 8h ago
"Penalizing solo travelers" is a hell of a spin on quantity discounts. If this isn't click bait what is?
DangitBobby · 7h ago
You can call it penalizing solo travelers, you can call it inventivizing group travelers. If you look at them relative to each other, both are true.
bredren · 8h ago
This just in: Airlines penalize those not traveling for bereavement.
niij · 7h ago
Airlines don't provide bereavement discounts anymore.
Spooky23 · 4h ago
Delta does.
deanCommie · 6h ago
Yup. It's funny how this stuff evolves.
You used to see "surcharge for visa" but visa made that illegal.
So now you see "discount for cash/debit", and everyone is happy!
fallingknife · 5h ago
Visa isn't happy. But fuck them in particular.
ttoinou · 9h ago
Huh if this becomes mainstream there's an opportunity to make a social media website to purchase in groups and make friends for the flights
al_borland · 8h ago
There are already websites, like Going, for getting flight deals. As a solo traveler who doesn’t have to coordinate with anyone and can pack light, I can jump on the deals when they come up and save a lot more than what a regular price group rate probably is. Looking at my upcoming trip, I got it for 50% off the current pricing, for solo or a couple.
Coordination with others also makes booking take longer and tends to fix dates and locations, which makes it hard to grab a deal when they come up.
ttoinou · 7h ago
I "used" Scott Cheap Flights in 2018 for a few years and never found a good deal
al_borland · 4h ago
You have to invert the order of how most people plan travel.
Typically people plan in this order:
1. Where to go
2. When to go
3. Check airfare
Flip it on its head:
1. Keep an eye out for cheap flights from your home airport
2. Pick one of those destinations
3. Choose when to go
Not exactly inverted, but the flight goes from last to first.
I had Ireland in my head for my next trip, but then Italy showed up last week. That sounded pretty good, so I checked the dates and found a flight that fit in my schedule, and booked it.
It’s not great for getting a flight around a conference, wedding, or some other event you are planning around. But when you know you want to take a vacation to somewhere and sometime this year, it can cut flight costs in half.
A single flight ends up paying for the cost of the subscription 10x over, and then some.
Also, it could be somewhere near where you want to go. I had tickets to Croatia about 5 years ago, but hand to cancel due to the pandemic. I didn’t know anything about Croatia when I booked, but I figured the worst case scenario was I catch a quick ferry or flight over to Italy once I’m there. Once you’re over there it’s cheap to go one country over. That flight to Croatia was $289, that cheaper than a flight to Nashville for me, which is only about an 8 hour drive.
I did the same thing when I booked a flight to Sweden. I didn’t know if I’d like it there, so from there I booked a connection to Copenhagen for next to nothing. I spent a week in Copenhagen, but then ultimately did go back to Sweden for week, which I ended up loving. I’m glad I didn’t spend the whole trip in Copenhagen.
Another deal I got that stood out was to Tokyo. I think I paid around $550 give or take. A coworker of mine has family there and goes on a regular basis, he was floored by that price. He always pays over $1k, and usually closer to $1,500.
Ultimately it’s just an alert service for flights that are abnormally low. If you have a specific destination in mind, Google Flights is pretty good at showing when the cheapest time to travel is, giving a booking date of today. Of course it fluctuates over time, which is where the alerts come in.
It’s saved me thousands. Though I probably would have only taken about 20% of the trips I have without it.
ttoinou · 3h ago
Thanks yeah that was my strategy I'm flexible with travels, I remember setting Paris and Lisbon after to see what flights I could have. Maybe it was focused on USA. Maybe their emails was getting my SPAM folder, IDK what happened but I never found what I was looking for.
I got my own flight tickets by looking on my own though.
550 USD for Tokyo is so cool, wow
mc32 · 9h ago
Good idea in principle. In practice this could invite unscrupulous actors, or people who flake out at higher rates than close family -not that families can’t flake out, but I’d imagine it’d be a lower incidence.
proee · 7h ago
This must be a new thing, because I've experienced the opposite. I needed to book 7 tickets, and the price was much higher than a single ticket. So I ended up adjusting the quantity and saw the price increase at around 4 tickets. So I ended up splitting the purchase into two transactions. However, after purchasing the first 4 tickets, the following price for single ticket was now slightly increased - so they were really playing some games or perhaps there was limited availability that was adjusting prices real-time.
bluGill · 7h ago
They are trying to charge as much as possible while filling the plane. If you take too many seats they need to up the price for the next person because someone needs to say too expensive and not fly on that plane
anonymars · 5h ago
I had the same with just two tickets. We ended up booking them separately because it was cheaper. It was a modest difference but still.
Marazan · 7h ago
Many airlines operate on the following model. Imagine the plane has a hundred economy seats. The seats will be split into groups of 10, each group has it's own price.
Group 1 seats cost 100 dollars
Group 2 seats cost 110 dollars
...
Group 10 seats are 350 dollars
Your group order got the last seats in group N and the first seats in group N+1
This is where the myth of "booking late gets you the cheapest seats" comes from. If an early booking passenger cancels their Group 1 seat it becomes available to buy again and it is still a group 1 seat even if every other seat has been sold. So late cancellations can make cheap seats available again.
Molitor5901 · 8h ago
Airlines are always doing a negative to consumers. Squeezing passengers, gouging, treating them like they're numbers on a spreadsheet - knowing their options are limited - seems modus operand by the airlines.
We need a passenger bill of rights, not just for the airlines, but also how passengers are treated in airports, by security, and concrete cause of action for consumers when airlines misbehave.
mustyoshi · 7h ago
This is no different than spending 98c per roll to buy 32 rolls of toilet paper vs 1.33$ per roll to only buy 12.
We have a Sam's Club membership because buying in bulk is cheaper.
Edit: checked prices Sam's vs Meijer
eduction · 9h ago
I would guess this is about middle seats. No one wants them but if you’re part of 2+ party you’re much more likely to take one. The alternative is two aisles side by side but those are tricky to get as the plane fills up.
layble · 9h ago
The business traveler who is less price sensitive and almost always books a solo itinerary.
kccqzy · 3h ago
> less price sensitive
As a business traveler I actually want the price to be as high as possible while satisfying the company rules on airfare. The fare is fully reimbursed, so a higher fare means I get more points on my credit card.
Now the company rules on airfare will probably reference something like the least-cost logical fare. So it is in a business traveler's interest for all airlines to raise prices simultaneously.
Business travel is weird.
VBprogrammer · 9h ago
It's a shame this is so far down the page (at least for me, at this moment) because I'm fairly certain you are exactly right.
ttoinou · 8h ago
HN comments vote need more than 40 minutes to stabilize
munificent · 8h ago
It's also literally in the article itself:
"It's just another way for airlines to continue 'segmenting' their customers, charging business travelers paying with a corporate card more while offering a better deal to families on the exact same flight."
asdff · 9h ago
All my solo flights over the last year were wedding related. That is probably a huge cash cow for the airline and hotel industry. The hotel is basically never full even with the hotel block so it is probably a very welcome cash infusion for them at an otherwise sleepy locale.
toast0 · 8h ago
I thought everybody booked aisle and window and left the middle unbooked. If you get lucky, you have an extra seat; if not, the middle seat will almost always be willing to swap for one of the other two and you can still sit together.
brightbeige · 8h ago
Nope. If an empty row is available, book the middle seat. No one wants to sit next to the weirdo who chooses the middle seat first.
nharada · 8h ago
I do this but I’ve been told other’s views on it range from “seems fine” to “this makes you a terrible person”
isaacremuant · 5h ago
If you this I won't swap with you because you're clearly an asshole and I'm not going to give you the satisfaction.
You're the kind of person forcing people to be separate just to try and get one over others. The type leaving their bag on the seat as a method of protecting your seat in the bus.
You also probably justify it as some sort of pragmatic thing but you're just selfish and inconsiderate.
rabiescow · 4h ago
The more people they can fill the flight with the more lucrative it is to fly that route, it makes perfect sense. Just like milk prices are more expensive the less you buy, per liter.
Anyone being upset about this is just looking for reasons to be upset and maybe should go outside more and get a hobby.
ponector · 6h ago
I had a different experience with Ryanair. When you book solo, they show you price with a tooltip: "last 2 tickets for that price!"
If you are going to book for 3 passengers they charge three of you with the next level, more expensive fare.
But so far my favorite is they force you to buy seat if you travel with infant. You cannot select free random seat as their planes have rules to allow infants only on the seat near the window.
FridayoLeary · 6h ago
I would just buy two seats and sort it out on the plane. It's not like they can separate you.
WalterBright · 6h ago
Companies give quantity discounts. Shocking!
diebeforei485 · 2h ago
Would this be allowed for international flights under IATA's fare rules?
glitchc · 7h ago
I'm not sure if this is driven to incentivize having children, but the more general point of incentivizing children for the good of society is a valid one. A society that stops having kids (or importing them) will cease to be a society before too long.
brm · 7h ago
Or, a society will just start having children again once the population gets small enough that having children becomes a more optimal decision or the supply of things that make having children optimal is increased...
skylerwiernik · 8h ago
I wonder if this could be abused by purchasing 2+ refundable tickets, and then canceling all but 1.
Matheus28 · 6h ago
Fully refundable tickets are an entirely different fare (and much more expensive)
yarone · 5h ago
Remember Accompany.com and Mercata and other group-buying websites from the 90's dotcom boom? Time for those again?
mgraczyk · 6h ago
This is good. Almost all price discrimination is good.
Larger groups are more price sensitive. They should pay less because they have more buying power when they buy ahead.
ge96 · 8h ago
it's crazy how if you just want a ticket now it could be say $700 but if you wait the same trip can take $150 different providers, I was the former just got something listed on Google Flights with SouthWest but yeah
MrToadMan · 8h ago
Seems intuitive: the group passengers are likely to have to cough up another 5-10% more at the time of check-in, in order to sit together, so it all evens out.
legitster · 8h ago
> In this case, the rationale for charging solo travelers more is fairly clear: It's just another way for airlines to continue “segmenting” their customers, charging business travelers paying with a corporate card more while offering a better deal to families on the exact same flight.
I think the explanation is wrong and the author is jumping to conclusions. Airlines have long offered "bulk" discounts. Their goal is to fill as many seats on a flight as possible. What we are seeing here is their group pricing creep into their direct sales.
obblekk · 6h ago
this might be a good thing if viewed from the opposite perspective: people with kids/elderly parents usually can't afford to pay as much per person as people traveling alone for fun/corporate travel.
fjasdfwa · 8h ago
Curious if any others are priced out of traveling? I haven't seen family in 3 years.
billyp-rva · 9h ago
Cell phone lines only $30/line when you buy six. What, you don't have a family of six? Weird.
mattgreenrocks · 9h ago
Or when you switch to an MVNO :)
skirmish · 6h ago
Then it's one line, $10 / month.
kristjansson · 3h ago
For the privilege of using the hand-me-down data of carrier's network (i.e. getting deprioritized in any situation where the network is congested)
sgerenser · 1h ago
USMobile gets you Verizon’s network at the same priority as Verizon customers. $390/year for “unlimited” data (but really 100GB/mo at high speed).
chgs · 5h ago
Why is American cell phone service so expensive?
anonymars · 5h ago
In comparison to what..? Vietnam? Canada?
darkhorn · 5h ago
What is next? Charge iPhone users more than Android users? Charge users with email address on custom domain more than on free emails? Charge Jews more than Mexicans?
You go to a bakery and he charges more because you wear a suit. You go to Europe, a guy in front of you buys a bread for €1, but same bread is €3 because you are tourist? Then you go to buy a toilet paper and same thing happens again because your ass is worth more?
muppetman · 9h ago
I love how the author thinks they've discovered something super secret, when they have in fact just learnt about "Group Discounts".
Author will lose their mind when they buy 10+ of the same thing from AliExpress.
tantalor · 9h ago
From the conclusion, they seem pretty confident that this is not "business as usual":
> Whenever this pricing strategy began, this is a massive change in how airlines set prices – and one that will likely catch many travelers off guard.
> Unlike shopping at retail stores or Costco, bulk discounts are unusual for airlines – at least not just for booking just two passengers instead of one. And these higher fares for one passenger are the opposite of what we typically see, where travelers booking for two passengers or more wind up getting charged more per person than a single passenger.
legitster · 8h ago
> Unlike shopping at retail stores or Costco, bulk discounts are unusual for airlines – at least not just for booking just two passengers instead of one. And these higher fares for one passenger are the opposite of what we typically see, where travelers booking for two passengers or more wind up getting charged more per person than a single passenger.
This isn't strictly true. Airlines have long offered bulk pricing through travel agencies and booking partners.
coldcode · 7h ago
This was prevalent until the early 2000s, it is far less common today. Corporate discounts used to exist based on guaranteed minimum legs in some time period. This ended when airlines discovered only flying full planes made them more money, making bulk discounts more pain that they were worth.
jjcob · 8h ago
It probably just depends on how full the flight is. If the plane is empty, there will be discounts for families, because they want to sell tickets, and families are price concious. Solo travellers usually are not.
If the plane is on a popular route, you'll pay through the nose, and there sure as hell won't be any group discounts. You'll pay almost full price for a two year old, because they know they'll fill the plane no matter what.
brigade · 8h ago
Airfare typically has group anti-discounts, where if you buy more tickets on a single reservation than tickets available at the lowest fare bucket, they’d sell you all the tickets at the higher fare instead of mixing fares
glitchc · 7h ago
That's my experience as well.
darth_avocado · 8h ago
2 isn’t exactly what you’d think of when you think of “Group discounts”.
aaomidi · 8h ago
Buy one get one free
jajko · 7h ago
You've never seen a 2+1 free or 3+1 free pricing in stores? We have them frequently here in Europe on some things. This is same thing and tbh I am surprised it took so long.
And as a father of 2 small kids not complaining at all, having multiple kids these days is brutal also financially, any small thing that helps is very much appreciated.
nickjj · 7h ago
> You've never seen a 2+1 free or 3+1 free pricing in stores?
Yes and as a solo person I can choose to buy those and take advantage of it in the same way a family can. Usually it's consumables like a 6 pack of bagels or something that might cost $5 which I'll 100% use.
This airline approach comes off much different, because as a solo traveler there is no benefit or reason why I would ever buy 2 tickets to save $80 per ticket since I wouldn't get any value from it and the cost of 2 tickets even with a discount will be greater than 1 non-discounted ticket.
Most airlines seem to also charge to pick your seats. I wonder if people who travel as a group end up paying that discount back to sit together.
josephcsible · 7h ago
This is different than most group discounts because the airlines aren't advertising it or making a big deal that they're doing it.
jlarocco · 7h ago
They'll be devastated when their large group has a gratuity included at the celebration dinner, though.
black6 · 6h ago
Airlines should grow up and start charging by weight just like carriers do for every good except passengers (flat rate shipping boxes excluded.)
notepad0x90 · 7h ago
it truly is unfortunate how society punishes you for being single. Insurance, tax, credit worthiness, even health care.
i wonder how low birthrate societies like Japan or South Korea are like, is it worse to improve birthrates? or is it better because being single isn't an anomaly?
More importantly, the number of single/solo people isn't even low in the US. If i had to ballpark it, at least a quarter of the population is like that. Lots of married people travel solo for business for example. Why aren't some airlines playing capitalism well by offering "business elite" flights where solo travelers get a loyalty discount and there are no children on the flight? Not for all destinations but at least popular ones like to vegas or NYC <-> LAX.
phil21 · 4h ago
Airlines already do that for business routes. Just in the other direction on pricing.
Pre-Covid there were a couple airlines playing around with business class only flights from NY to LA.
Solo business travelers are where the money is made. The rest of the seats tend to exist at cost or even below to fill up the plane. Airlines would be pretty foolish to try to lower margin on the least price sensitive class of traveler they service.
desireco42 · 9h ago
I think they because so custom in their pricing that is becoming insane... I wish they are more predictable in how much things cost, it is almost like weather, how much will airfare cost.
phyzix5761 · 8h ago
If you can predict consumer demand, trade policy, interest rates, and money printing schedules then you can predict prices. Problem is we can't predict any of those things.
Aurornis · 9h ago
I never would have understood this as a young, single person. Now that I have a family there are several times per year where we price out the cost of a solo ticket for one parent, the price of taking one or two kids, or the cost of all of us going for something. Having a quantity discount would absolutely tip the scales for us for certain trips.
People will look at this as penalizing single travelers and want everyone to have the lowest fare, but that’s not the real alternative. A flat fare would bring solo prices down and group rates up so the blended average is the same.
n8cpdx · 9h ago
Traveling solo is already brutal because hotels and Airbnbs are priced on the assumption of two travelers.
Traveling solo essentially costs double automatically because of lodging, and it kind of sucks there’s a double whammy with airfare where, unlike lodging, the penalty doesn’t actually make any sense.
I guess as a family be grateful that all hotel rooms come with a 50% (or more) discount per traveler?
tshaddox · 8h ago
It's probably also worth noting that the majority of these hotels and Airbnbs are also designed to accommodate two or more travelers. Thus the complaint isn't really "single-person rooms are priced that same as two-person rooms," but rather "single-person rooms don't exist, which means I have to pay for more space than I need." In this sense it's not really any different than any other product that you wish was sold in smaller quantities.
ghaff · 7h ago
It's probably a bit of a mixed bag. Beds are reasonable for two people (Usually a queen/king or a couple queens). But there may be only one sitting chair. Two people can manage but hotels split the difference a lot of the time.
TheOtherHobbes · 7h ago
The difference in costs between accommodating one person and two people is pretty minimal. Even things like breakfasts are prepared in bulk.
Most single people own and sleep in double beds, so there's no sense in which a double bed is "designed to accomodate" two travellers.
The issue is more that discounted single room rates would encourage unofficial double stays, which would lose significant income.
tshaddox · 7h ago
I doubt the difference is minimal. Forget the size of beds, the point is that a hotel with 200 single-person rooms has twice the beds, twice the bathrooms, roughly twice the walls, etc. than a hotel with 100 two-person rooms.
chgs · 5h ago
A hotel hosting 100 single people will be roughly the same size and operating costs as a hotel hosting 100 couples, even if the rooms had a 3’ bed rather than a 6’ bed
And thus could be 3’ smaller
tshaddox · 4h ago
Right, but the former hotel has half the capacity as the latter.
eCa · 7h ago
At least here in Europe there are plenty of hotels with solo traveller rooms (<=120 cm beds). But still not uncommonly priced at 80-95% of a double occupancy doublebed-room.
I often book a double for myself (often for the same price or €10 more) for a bigger bed.
chgs · 5h ago
The room will be about the same size as a room with a double bed in, so 80% seems a massive difference
patcon · 8h ago
(Saying all this with respect for those who value privacy more than me )
Hostels are for this market, no? Share physical infra (bathroom/heating/walls) with other humans (aka strangers) and you get the same family discount. You're not obligated to pay the premium unless you want your own bathroom and own personal space like families tend to want
As in: families don't get a discount, they just amortise the cost of privacy that you also seem to specifically need/want. but many solo travellers don't care to pay for that.
n8cpdx · 31m ago
I’ve done hostel and like that option when there is a private room. I often/always travel with electronics and things that I want to feel comfortable leaving behind, and I don’t like leaving my laptop and game consoles unattended in communal spaces.
kaikai · 7h ago
There’s a very big difference between sharing sleeping space with multiple complete strangers and sharing space with family.
chgs · 5h ago
The point is you are paying for one bed, one living area, one bathroom, whether you are a single traveller or as a couple. I’m in a hotel room at the moment with a bed and a sofa, can host 4 people or me, it’s the same size. At breakfast I usually sit on a table which can seat 4, but certainly one that can seat 2. I use almost all the resources a couple do, and spend less at the bar in the evening, so I’d expect to pay the same or even more.
growlNark · 5h ago
Hostels often offer private rooms, to varying degree of privacy. But i've certainly stayed at hostels that offer very comfortable single private rooms with private bathrooms for a third the cost of a local hotel room. Expensive for a hostel, but great value for the privacy.
But if you're traveling with your family, just get hotel rooms. Hostels only came up in the first place in response to a gripe about solo travel.
al_borland · 8h ago
Cruises are especially bad for this. I’ve never gone, but I’ve looked at but after I had 3 independent people tell me to take one in the span of a few months. Most are priced assuming 2 people in the room and if you’re solo it seems like they expect you to buy 2 spots.
I’ve seen a couple where they have a few solo cabins, but the amount of effort to surface this stuff turns me off to the whole thing.
The only reason I’m still half looking is that it seems like the easiest way for a random person to set foot on Antarctica, which would be a cool thing to check off the bucket list.
ghaff · 8h ago
>if you’re solo it seems like they expect you to buy 2 spots
Cruises are probably more complicated because they price things other than your cabin into the "experience." (Though I think the Queen Mary 2 a few years back was slightly less than 2x for just me.) But the random Marriott doesn't really care if there is one of you or two when it comes to pricing.
al_borland · 7h ago
The other things priced into the "experience" are why I call out cruises separately. With a hotel, I get it, a room is a room. But a solo cruiser is eating half the food, drinking half the drinks, taking up half as many seats at shows...
Maybe that's the problem. Cruises rely on people spending a lot of extra money onboard the ship, or drink packages, nicer dinners, excursions, etc... fewer people doing that, with less social pressure to spend extra, means less money for them and they have to make it up somewhere.
MichaelZuo · 8h ago
Why wouldn’t they care?
I imagine 2 people use roughly twice the bedding, towels, toiletries, etc., on average.
losteric · 8h ago
2 vs 1 doesn’t significantly impact space or cleaning labor, unless you’re staying in a super minimalist itty bitty unit (which I rarely find exists anymore)
ghaff · 8h ago
Well, they mostly don't. They're often using the same bedding. Most toiletries are squirt containers these days. I don't think toilet paper is that expensive. And another towel or two to wash is probably not a big deal. And to the degree the hotel has a restaurant or bar they probably come out ahead. Your hotel may take a different approach but it's near universal (perhaps outside of resorts) that hotels charge the same for 1 or 2 guests.
decimalenough · 7h ago
Citation needed. In my experience it's entirely the opposite: it's nearly universal that hotels charge more for two guests than one.
You can easily verify this on Booking.com, where the search results show price per room and how it varies based on how many people are in that room and whether they're adults or children.
sgerenser · 1h ago
Is this a non-U.S. thing perhaps? I’ve never in my life seen a U.S. hotel charge more for double occupancy, outside of special packages that include e.g. meals for each guest.
ahtihn · 6h ago
Price only varies for the breakfast-included option in my experience.
ghaff · 7h ago
I don't care to do research. I will say when I book on Marriott.com there's never a difference. I don’t use booking.com much though.
mgkimsal · 8h ago
If there's two beds, maybe. If one bed, doesn't matter how many people sleep in it. Maybe twice the towels?
I'll say over the years most places do not respect the "if the towel is not on the floor don't replace it". I'm fine with reusing a towel to dry off twice, but some hotels change them every day, even when their signage is indicating a protocol to prevent that sort of waste.
onlypassingthru · 8h ago
There are a couple travel agencies in Ushuaia that sell open cabins at steep discount for cruises heading across the Drake Passage. If you've got a little flexibility in your schedule, you can set foot in Antarctica for a lot less than if you bought a ticket anywhere else.
also: be sure to make offerings to the sea gods before sailing because crossing the Drake Passage can be... exciting.
jltsiren · 7h ago
Ships going to Antarctica often offer single beds in shared cabins.
When I went there, I booked the cheapest bed (maybe $6500 in 2013) in a three-person cabin. It was early season and the ship wasn't full, so the company filled it with backpackers waiting for last-minute discounts in the hostels of Ushuaia. Because I had paid the full price, they upgrade me two classes to a much nicer two-person cabin. And then halfway through the trip, the ship delivered some staff to a museum. The other guy got their cabin, and I got the one we had shared.
QuercusMax · 7h ago
I just invited myself along on a "girl's cruise" to Alaska that my wife was doing with her friend (who's actually my second cousin). As the third person in the cabin, my fare only cost $99, plus some fees, compared the several thousand each my wife and cousin paid.
There were quite a few solo travelers we met on the cruise, though - I think they mostly had solo inside cabins with no view.
Ekaros · 7h ago
It is strange balance, but in cruising there is expectation that money is spend outside the base fare on extra experiences. So getting double money from double occupancy is important. Cost of basic food doesn't scale that much. And these extra revenue opportunities is also why occupancy beyond double is so much cheaper.
duped · 8h ago
Ease is relative especially considering cost, but that's the kind of thing that having a good travel agent is good for (eg: finding someone with knowledge of where to stay in Chile and who to hire for a charter flight or boat trip). Economies of scale kinda kick in though so a cruise is probably the least expensive.
desert_rue · 8h ago
Cruises are selling a set space rather than a service or trip per person. The extra incremental cost is minimal for the second person.
Also the more people on the ship means more chances of selling high margin add ons like drink packages, excursions and so on.
mmcconnell1618 · 8h ago
Some cruise lines, like Norwegian, have specific solo travel fares and cabins and even social events just for solo travelers
jajko · 7h ago
Go to Ushuaia, and book a normal ship just like all other folks do. You will have 100x more rewarding experience from all of it, guaranteed. Its not just destination but whole road to it that make such trips worthwhile and you will keep remembering it for rest of your days.
Cruises are for folks, how to say it politely... who gave up on any form of adventure or excitement in their lives. Dont be that person, not yet at least.
sidewndr46 · 8h ago
I don't really find this relevant in the US because airline pricing is already the ultimate brutal form of pricing. Not only are they allowed to bill you whatever they want, they are never under any actual obligation to put you on the plane.
hiAndrewQuinn · 8h ago
This seems surprising to me. I was under the impression that airlines are pretty low profit margin industries, pulling in only around 3-4% in a decent year, and that of that the airline tickets themselves are the lowest margin items percentage wise, with other things like baggage fees being much more load bearing.
dlisboa · 8h ago
You are correct. As much as we like to bash airlines and their decisions, and liking low fares and quality service myself, it's objectively one of the worst businesses imaginable. Extremely high risk, low margin. Every year about a dozen airlines go bankrupt, get merged or bailed out. A small increase in the price of oil is a major risk for most of them.
Most of the more profitable markets have high competition not only by other airlines but also other forms of transportation. Very few airlines are swimming in cash and even those are only a couple bad years away from bankrupcy.
authorfly · 7h ago
You'd like Milton Friedman and his take on pilot Unions too.
dlisboa · 7h ago
Knowing Friedman's other takes, probably not.
chgs · 5h ago
As the saying goes. The best way to be a millionaire running an airline is to start as a billionaire.
os2warpman · 7h ago
Airfare is the cheapest it has been in the entire history of commercial aviation except for immediately after 9/11 and the initial weeks of the global covid lockdown-- but both you and I know those periods don't count.
Most people are ok with terrible service because they save money.
Doesn't stop them from complaining, though.
And yes, "cheapest" includes taxes and all fees.
You can fly from New York to Paris non-stop for $150 if you are patient and flexible. (Please please please call me a liar.)
If you are not patient $500 is more typical.
Twenty years ago was a $800 ticket.
Thirty years ago that was a $1000 ticket.
authorfly · 7h ago
What's your patient/flexible technique? Let me know.
And you are not a liar - but your claim isn't true at all in Europe - see increased per-flight legislated fees and the loss of budget airlines. Price of flights between 2 destinations has increased by 25-40% in the last 5 years in most of Europe.
You can still get the madly cheap hop flights, but they are often pricing in income from our flights (or accepting even negative returns by pricing above the per-flight fees) because the planes need to be where you are going to fly a profitable flight later.
So the old status quo where genuinely cheap flights could be booked on a 7 day basis (e.g. cheap thursday-thursday flights) has been replaced by convoluted patterns to get the cheap flights (you usually need to leave on Monday, return on Saturday (if your source airport has lower demand than the destination) or vice versa. I suggest based on flights in the US becoming cheaper, that this is due to government intervention.
I get saving the environment and all that. But let me pay more taxes monthly, don't charge the airline £15 minimum making a bunch of flights unviable. Don't make booking a holiday or conference flight so unpleasant and annoying. I always have to tradeoff wasting a day or two with paying 50-150 euros extra.
It's not the worlds biggest problem, but making that decision is a regular additional dilemma I didn't want in my life. I wish for the days when you could get just normal timetabled flights at good costs if the month (e.g. February) was unpopular for travel. Now those months really aren't cheaper.
tredre3 · 6h ago
If calling you a liar gets me a no-stop ticket from America to Paris for only 150 bucks, then you're a liar.
os2warpman · 1h ago
All I did was go to Expedia and put in JFK and CDG and $149 on Tuesday, July 15th on Norse Atlantic Airways popped up. Return flights the next week were $200-300. Round trip with a one-week stay were ~$500.
Round trips in September are $386-500 depending on the day and duration of the stay. The $386 fare was for a tuesday-to-tuesday week stay and I might just take it, I will be bumping up against use-or-lose limits for PTO by then. There are fewer crowds in September and the weather is really nice.
They are a low profit business, and that kind of liberty is stuff that pushes their profits even lower. They also always fail to differentiate from one another and are always competing on only price and how much fees they can keep hidden.
Personally, I do argue that it's worth it having tickets 10% more expensive and forcing the companies to always allocate all passengers, treat people humanely and etc. It's even worth it the 25% increase to make them let people carry luggage and avoid all the troubles that come with the optionality. But most governments seem to disagree.
umanwizard · 7h ago
> It's even worth it the 25% increase to make them let people carry luggage
You are asking for people who fly without checked luggage (as I usually do) to subsidize you.
AlotOfReading · 8h ago
Depending on which party you're talking about (airport, airline, etc), a no-bag economy ticket is often below cost, which is made up in volume and extras.
tshaddox · 8h ago
The fact that their brutally anti-consumer business is also not even that profitable for them is really no consolation to the consumer.
umanwizard · 7h ago
Yes it is, because it's the reason why air travel is extremely cheap relative to historical norms.
sidewndr46 · 8h ago
This is correct, the single passenger 'economy' ticket is usually a loss leader.
You can make the argument that airlines are companies that sell in flight beverages and also happen to fly a passenger airplane. The actual profit comes from an unusual sources, like deals with credit card issues for a "rewards" program that gives you frequent flyer miles
os2warpman · 8h ago
>Not only are they allowed to bill you whatever they want, they are never under any actual obligation to put you on the plane.
With exceptions, once you have paid for a ticket all commercial passenger airlines are obligated to transport you under their contract of carriage.
All airlines must do this, I even looked up the contract of carriage for the shittiest airline I could think of and Frontier has this to say:
>Involuntary -- If insufficient passengers volunteer, passengers who cannot be accommodated on the flight will be denied boarding and Frontier will provide transportation on a Frontier flight to the same destination. After a passenger’s boarding pass is collected or scanned and accepted by the gate agent, and the passenger has boarded, a passenger may be removed from a flight only for safety or security reasons or in accordance with Section 3 of this Contract of Carriage.
They must also compensate you. If being denied boarding delays you for 1-2 hours you get 2x the cost of the fare up to $1550 and 2+ hours 4x up to $2150.
And they still have to put you on a plane:
>A passenger denied boarding, voluntarily or involuntarily, pursuant to this section, will be transported on Frontier’s next available flight on which space is available and at no additional charge.
Contracts of carriage are pretty much boilerplate but all of this is to say: if you pay, show up on time, and aren't denied boarding for a safety reason airlines are obligated to transport you to your destination.
(in the US)
shawabawa3 · 7h ago
"next available flight" could mean waiting 2 days in a random airport, hardly reassuring
sidewndr46 · 7h ago
One of my co-workers had a flight delayed so long that the alternative flight they offered would have him stay on the plane at the destination airport and begin his home journey immediately.
sidewndr46 · 6h ago
"denied boarding" seems pretty key here. What about when the airline decides you aren't on the flight in the first place?
greenavocado · 8h ago
> they are never under any actual obligation to put you on the plane.
It's true that airlines wield pricing power but their Contract of Carriage, buried under more fine print than a payday loan agreement, does impose obligations. Rule 21 of United's Contract explicitly allows refusal of transport, but Rule 4 confirms that a ticket with a confirmed reservation constitutes a binding agreement to provide service, absent violations by the passenger (like failing to check in). Rule 25 further mandates denied boarding compensation when overselling occurs, because even in brutal airline economics, a confirmed reservation isn't merely a suggestion, it's a contractual commitment, however creatively airlines may interpret "commitment." Of course, involuntary bumping, force majeure, and the ever-convenient "operational decisions" let airlines off the hook. But to claim they have no obligations is not true.
AlotOfReading · 8h ago
Some countries (e.g. Japan) charge per person in non-Western hotels. Even then, you may get different prices for a solo traveler because the lower overall price means they need to increase the per person rate to make enough margin with their fixed costs.
frank_nitti · 8h ago
They do this in Mexico as well. Always just seems like an honor system thing unless they are checking people at the door to the hotel and/or room each time they enter, which only seems realistic in very small hotels who have no e.g. restaurant open to the public.
Otherwise can’t one just rent the room as a solo guest, and just have someone come through later, as long as there isn’t an obvious group activity going on inside the room?
sjf · 8h ago
Why do people put locks on glass doors? Society only works because of the assumption that ~90% of people will follow the rules.
carlosjobim · 8h ago
Are you going to bring your own sheets and breakfast as well?
sgerenser · 1h ago
I don’t know about yours, but my spouse is OK with sharing sheets with me.
alexey-salmin · 7h ago
> I guess as a family be grateful that all hotel rooms come with a 50% (or more) discount per traveler?
This is not always the case. A two-bedroom hotel suite on average costs more than two standard rooms. This happens because the vast majority of rooms are twin/double and cheap hotels often don't offer suites at all.
At a given location two travellers would be chosing from e.g 100 options and at least some of these would be budget/discount offerings. In the same location a family of four would have to chose from 10 options and likely none of them are budget/discount.
Now consider that you HAVE to travel during the school holidays so competition for these damn 10 options increases and the price for both hotels and tickets easily goes up 2-3x.
There are some situations where a family of four would get a better price per person but most of the time it's the other way round.
reliabilityguy · 8h ago
You can make the same argument about food too: buying chicken at Costco is way cheaper per pound than in Whole Foods or Aldi. Are they also penalizing single people? No: buy more, pay less per unit.
authorfly · 7h ago
What packs do you buy where it is much more cheaper?
Frozen > 5kg or so?
Mistletoe · 8h ago
You can’t freeze a hotel room.
tshaddox · 8h ago
The hotel also cannot easily split and recombine rooms and beds on demand. They have to decide upfront how many single-person and two-person rooms to build, based on what they perceive the market desires.
I see people complaining a lot about single traveler (with their own room) surcharges on both group and self-guided trips. But, you're right, while per-person-double-occupancy rates make it explicit, it's pretty much the norm at most hotels whether stated as such or not.
anigbrowl · 7h ago
Looks like the deal is to find someone else who wants to go the same way and then buy the tickets together.
I'm pitching the movie to the Hallmark channel right now.
Aurornis · 4h ago
You could look at it that way, but in practice I don’t actually divide travel costs by the number of people who go.
It comes out of the family budget either way.
pwim · 7h ago
In Japan, you pay by the person when it comes to hotels. Some will give you a slight discount for the second person. Others won’t.
andix · 8h ago
> Traveling solo is already brutal because hotels and Airbnbs are priced on the assumption of two travelers
The cost for the hotel and Airbnb doesn't really change a lot, if there is more than one person staying in the room. More or less another set of towels and a bit more soap. Even providing rooms with single beds only brings down the costs marginally.
mmustapic · 7h ago
> Traveling solo essentially costs double automatically because of lodging
Travelling with somebody else brings costs down. Hotel rooms have the same surface for single and double occupancy (in fact they are usually the same rooms!). Even if you remove the surface of one single bed, the room stays almost the same. So, it’s much cheaper for 2.
bdangubic · 7h ago
provided you have someone to go with :)
hellisothers · 8h ago
How are 2 travelers priced in? If I rent a 4 passenger car are 4 people priced in?
1776smithadam · 8h ago
Would a van cost more to rent then a sedan?
dowager_dan99 · 8h ago
different scenario; more appropriate would be the same car with zero or 1,2, or more passengers.
chrisweekly · 8h ago
yes (car rental prices are mostly a function of size)
tshaddox · 8h ago
Only when you're comparing the cheapest vehicles of each size, where the cost of the vehicle and maintenance is probably roughly in line with vehicle size. There are plenty of luxury and sports cars widely available for rent that will cost more than a minivan.
aaomidi · 8h ago
But in reality, rarely. The pricing is mostly a function of luxury AND space.
I’ve regularly seen larger cars with more capacity equal to medium sedans.
No comments yet
soperj · 8h ago
Why wouldn't you just stay in a hostel?
or rent a room on airbnb?
garciasn · 8h ago
For two reasons:
1. I don't want to stay in a hostel. See below for more on this; but, hostels, at least the ones I have researched, have bunk rooms and shared facilities. Hard pass for me.
2. I don't like sharing a bedroom and, especially, a bathroom in someone's home when they may be there. There's simply a different level of security (potentially false, I understand) in a hotel vs a rented room in a house.
dlisboa · 7h ago
Reframing it to how it sounds to me: you'd like to temporarily reserve a massive amount of real estate (relative to your human body) from a city's housing reserve and not be forced to pay any more for that than the family who would put 4 people in that same footprint.
tshaddox · 8h ago
Families who travel together also share rooms and facilities, so if that's a hard pass for you then you wouldn't be happy with the "discount" of traveling as part of a family either.
garciasn · 8h ago
I appreciate the pedantry; but, there’s a significant difference between several random someone(s) having travelers diarrhea in a shared bathroom and my family.
jeremyjh · 7h ago
The point is multiple people sharing facilities get discounts. It’s nothing more sinister than that. The hotel charges per room, and rooms include facilities. The costs for the hotel don’t depend on how many people are staying in that room.
tshaddox · 7h ago
Right, but my point is that you're now no longer complaining about the concept of offering discounts for room-sharing. Now you're complaining that there's no one you would be comfortable sharing a room with.
garciasn · 6h ago
No; I’m complaining about the alternatives listed.
AStonesThrow · 34m ago
It may have been 5 years ago or so, yes late 2020, when I had a ridiculous idea to visit Hollywood to see a concert. And I considered staying in a hostel in the area.
"Hostel" may mean different things in different parts of the world. When I was growing up, I heard about "youth hostels" that were mostly in Europe and mostly providing inexpensive accommodations to college-age people who were backpacking through the continent or had a Eurail Pass for traveling, etc. But I have never stayed in one.
When I surveyed a few hostels in Hollywood, it seemed that they were indeed targeting college-age people. Furthermore, they were cultivating a "package deal" atmosphere where there were day trips and coffee hours and programmed activities, for residents to do while they were there. And with limited privacy and shared facilities, there could be bustling activity and interruptions of sleep all night long. They did not seem like places to check in, crash overnight and leave in the morning. And that is probably calculated to appeal to the clientele who are not homeless and did not simply save up $40 by panhandling during the past week.
33MHz-i486 · 7h ago
kids dont make any income. a weekend trip for 4 in the same timezone costs us $3k to 5k. a cross country trip is 10-20k.
DINK > Solo >> anything else
growlNark · 8h ago
Hostels are wonderful for single traveling, though. And that's in spite of the fact that hostels also have bulk discounts.
the_third_wave · 7h ago
When travelling on your own just go to hostels instead of hotels and you-ll both pay much less (prices normally are per person, not per room) and you'll meet more people who are open to interacting with other solo travellers.
blharr · 8h ago
> People will look at this as penalizing single travelers
> A flat fare would bring solo prices down and group rates up so the blended average is the same
So... it is penalizing solo travelers?
SecretDreams · 8h ago
Everything hinges on filling the airplane as often as they can. A blend of solo and group travel is probably easier to fill planes. Looking at prices alone is only part of the picture, imo. Group travelers are also more likely to pay for at least 1-2 bags, which brings in some extra $$.
DSMan195276 · 7h ago
To add on to this, the issue in the article is really more about one-way tickets than single passenger, if you buy a round-trip ticket for that flight the difference in price goes away. In fact, a single passenger round-trip ticket that includes the flight in the article is cheaper than buying the one-way ticket on its own (as in, both tickets _together_ are less than the one-way, it's cheaper to buy the round-trip and skip the return flight). Google suggests that one-way tickets get uniquely screwed because they're often used for business-related travel, but I don't really see anything definitive.
You can also get screwed in the other direction where groups are more expensive - airlines will sometimes bump every ticket in a group to a higher fare level even if they still list one or two tickets at a cheaper price for smaller groups.
dlisboa · 8h ago
Group travelers also buy assigned seats more often.
Matheus28 · 8h ago
Sounds like you’re only fine with it because you personally benefit from it.
atonse · 8h ago
Or it could just be a certain way of framing things?
But for the benefit of this debate I'll state my bias. Almost all my travel is as a group.
But in most other facets of life, we save by buying more, right? (buying wholesale, buying bulk, etc).
So I've actually had the other feeling... if I'm buying 4 tickets at once, can I get a bit of a volume discount? And I'm not sure that's what the airlines are doing here (I don't ascribe any altruism, it's probably more that families were getting cold feet with increasing prices), but I like that I get some kind of cheaper rate when I'm buying 4x of something, just like in just about every other purchase in life.
popalchemist · 7h ago
If it were the same, there would be no motive to do it.
One way or another, this increases profit for them.
miltonlost · 7h ago
> People will look at this as penalizing single travelers and want everyone to have the lowest fare, but that’s not the real alternative. A flat fare would bring solo prices down and group rates up so the blended average is the same.
So it’s still penalizing being single. Single travelers are subsidizing group rates. They are being penalized for not buying multiple. You didn’t explain how it’s not a penalty to buy as one person
BoorishBears · 8h ago
This makes no sense.
A solo traveler can decide to take a trip because they saw a good fare very trivially: you're not going on a trip with 2 days notice just because a fare "tipped the scale" when you need 10x the planning and logistics, and the airlines know that.
They're not doing it to entice families to travel, they just know solo travel is associated with higher incomes and want to extract more money.
silisili · 8h ago
That sounds a lot like a subsidy, which I'm generally not a big fan of. Sure you and I benefit from it, but it doesn't seem fair to a solo traveler.
That said, I have to imagine the reasoning behind it having to do with assuming some large percentage of solo travelers are on work expense trips, so squeezing the company for a few more dimes. The article assumes as much -
> It's just another way for airlines to continue “segmenting” their customers, charging business travelers paying with a corporate card more while offering a better deal to families on the exact same flight.
A lot of companies I've worked for don't even do corporate cards, they just tell you to pay for it and submit for reimbursement.
All of that rabble out of the way, it feels like it would be impossible to identify business vs leisure customers up front, so it sounds like solo leisure travelers are caught in the crossfire.
criley2 · 8h ago
Bulk discounts don't "penalize" smaller purchases, they reward larger purchases.
Companies offer bulk discounts on basically... everything.
This is like pointing out that the Dollar Store penalizes people for buying small quantities and thus suggesting that Costco should raise prices to "make it fair".
mike_d · 7h ago
No, it is discrimination based on marital/family status.
If they were willing to sell me 5 flight coupons for a discount, that would be acceptable. There is nothing I can do as an individual to take advantage of the discount.
criley2 · 4h ago
Nonsense. The airline doesn't ask your marital/family status. They simply offer a bulk discount.
By your logic, Costco is also "discriminating based on marital/family status" by selling bulk at discount. Costco doesn't sell "buy 1/5 a toilet paper package, come back and get the other 4 1/5 later". They sell the whole package up front, use it or lose it.
That's how bulk discounts work.
Heck, you could say that a gallon of milk discriminates against you because you have to pay way more to buy a pint of it, and you can't "come back later for the other pints at the same price".
This is absurdism to the highest degree.
You are welcome to book flights with friends, or even organize a flight-share program and go in on flights with strangers. Bulk doesn't discriminate. I know folks who go in together on Costco bulk because they can't use it all. Make the system work for you.
darth_avocado · 8h ago
We as a society already penalize people without families:
1. Higher taxes and fewer deductions
2. Higher workplace performance expectations
3. Higher costs in every aspect of life
4. Fewer options eat out, expensive solo tickets at events etc.
This is just one more example in a long list of examples of how being by yourself is penalized in the society.
IshKebab · 8h ago
Yeah I used to think that until I had a family. In reality it's more like:
1. Taxes are more punishing because you're spending half your disposable income on children, and most of it probably comes from one earner. You can say "don't have children if you can't afford it" all you like, but you wouldn't be alive if nobody had children, so it's quite selfish of anyone to be anti-children.
2. For men performance expectations are the same but now you have to somehow simultaneously be at work and also pick up your children from school at 3pm. Oh and don't forget you have to somehow cover like 80 days of school holidays a year. For women... well you can legislate that being off work for 2 years doesn't matter all you want; in reality it is a major disruption to careers.
3. Childcare is far more expensive than any increased cost I experienced for being single, with the possible exception of not being able to share rent with a partner. But once you have children... rent for a family is more than double rent for a one bed flat.
4. Yeah price me up a skiing holiday for a family of 4. Now do it for a single person (and double it if you like).
The very reason that discounted family tickets exist is that families wouldn't buy any tickets otherwise because they would be too expensive. It's the same reason student discounts exist. It's called price discrimination.
I do agree it's pretty annoying and feels unfair though. The optimum group from a price point of view is really a couple, not a family.
hypeatei · 8h ago
> you wouldn't be alive if nobody had children, so it's quite selfish of anyone to be anti-children.
It gets into philosophical territory, but the default "having a pulse = good" thinking is pretty shortsighted IMO. Life is inherently suffering and no one got a yes/no prompt before being born.
glitchc · 7h ago
While there are people who wish that "yes" was a "no" instead, they form an exceedingly small portion of the general population. Most people are happy they exist.
dlisboa · 8h ago
For a society it's not philosophical. If it wishes to exist past a few decades then it needs children, simple as that. Therefore societies are (and should) be skewed towards that.
hypeatei · 7h ago
I'll ask this in response: why does society need to exist at all?
Obviously ideas like yours are ingrained into us at a biological level and it logically makes sense if we want to survive as a species... but there is no inherent reason other than "just because" right?
IshKebab · 7h ago
Well yeah, because of our ingrained sense of morality & self-preservation. But we're talking about the policies of society so it's kind of pointless discussing them if you don't accept that society should exist in the first place.
Also... it's not society, it's the human species.
dlisboa · 7h ago
That's indeed a philosophical question. Should we even exist at all?
It's a strange thing of nature and evolution that it creates a species that can plan and execute its own intentional suicide.
layer8 · 7h ago
“No children” and “single” isn’t the same, as evidenced by DINKs. That set aside, you’re just confirming that singles are (or should be) penalized.
dlisboa · 7h ago
Yes, that's just a necessity for the persistence of a society. Otherwise there's no point in even organizing as one. I'm not making a value judgment by the way, just an objective statement. I was also once part of a "DINK" and someone who thought would not have children, I have no qualms with that, but there's just no point in prioritizing that segment.
scienceman · 7h ago
you get a yes/no prompt every day after you are born though -- and most people keep saying yes until they're ripped out
mike_d · 7h ago
> Yeah I used to think that until I had a family.
It is amazing how blatantly people will just admit "I agree with politics that benefit me even if they exclude others."
> Taxes are more punishing because you're spending half your disposable income on children
I probably spend on my dogs what you do on your children. Gosh life sure is hard because of my decisions. Where are my discounts and tax refunds?
> It's called price discrimination.
...and when is discrimination ok? Lets all say it out loud.
IshKebab · 7h ago
> dogs
Dogs are not people. Society does not rely on the continued existence of dogs. Do you see any governments enacting policies to make people have more dogs?
> when is discrimination ok?
When it makes things more moral/fair. Do you object to student discounts? Progressive taxes? You seem to be having a knee-jerk reaction to the word "discrimination". It's also called "price differentiation". Maybe that sounds less bad to you?
chgs · 5h ago
Who do you think will look after you when you are 70? Who will grow your food, make your car, fly your plane etc?
tuckerman · 8h ago
Is it possible to distinguish between society penalizing being single and society incentivizing having children? Since society's existence requires that people have children (even in the fairly short term, someone younger has to be around to take care of the older folks) it seems reasonable to incentivize it.
I guess it's all relative, lower taxes for A compared to B looks like higher taxes for B compared to A, but I suspect most of this comes from a) incentivizing people to form as many families w/ children as possible and then b) since there are so many families w/ children, people build businesses that assume most people will be in families.
tshaddox · 8h ago
I think even calling it "society incentivizing people to have children" is a bit of a stretch, since in most cases the tax advantages are unlikely to result in a net financial advantage given the financial costs of raising children. In most cases the thought isn't "I'm ambivalent about having children but I will do it for the financial benefits" and rather "I'd like to have children, but it's very expensive, and the tax advantages slightly lessen the expensive."
tuckerman · 7h ago
This has been my experience as well, childcare alone is a pretty big part of my budget. I am definitely not better off financially by having a toddler :D
I still think of it as incentivizing in the same way the EV rebate helped encourage me to buy my first EV, even if the cost of the car still was more than I would have been willing to pay for an ICE car. It made a difficult thing (slightly) less difficult.
authorfly · 7h ago
Single also differs from being in a childless couple e.g. in your early 20s.
To get on the ladder today, 5 years sharing rent is priceless. Then once you do, you get child benefits. Many people are single late in life too. So I don't think it's something you can equate.
al_borland · 8h ago
I went to buy tickets to a comedy show last year and they wouldn’t let me buy a single ticket. I had to buy 2. It quite literally doubled the cost, and then a seat went empty.
If someone were to buy 3 tickets, it could just as easily leave an orphaned seat.
ghaff · 8h ago
I've never run into such a thing across many years. I buy single tickets to Broadway/West End shows a lot of the time and I often land great tickets.
al_borland · 7h ago
I've seen it twice now, both times within the past couple years. I'm not sure if it is the venue of the performer that imposes it, but it's really bad. To get single tickets, people are basically left to sit and wait for all the other seats to be bought, then hope there are single person gaps they can fill.
4ndrewl · 8h ago
OTOH when you retire those other people's kids will be powering the economy that will be financing your pension.
neutronicus · 7h ago
It's not even retirement.
When a 25-year-old lands a senior role in 10 years at 35, it's because someone else's 13-year-old grew up, graduated college, and got hired as a junior. Promotions are 10% Crushing It, 90% dumping your grunt work on some poor sap too young to know better.
Society is a pyramid scheme, and, like all pyramid schemes, bringing more people in is ultimately more valuable than actually selling the LuLaRoe or whatever.
nemomarx · 8h ago
how are there less options for people without families to eat out? I'm not following that part
brandall10 · 8h ago
Nicer restaurants often won't accept reservations for solo diners, leaving them to come at off-hours or eat at the bar.
Obviously that's a pure economic thing you can't get mad at as tables are designed for 2+ and you're trying to get in during a high traffic time.
darth_avocado · 8h ago
You can’t eat out alone everywhere
AlotOfReading · 8h ago
This is extremely uncommon in my experience, to the point where I've really only heard of it happening secondhand. I've seen people eating alone everywhere from fast food to Michelin star restaurants and done it myself many times. Where have you seen it?
prerok · 8h ago
In my experience as well, never been denied dining. But... maybe different parts of the world have different customs.
chgs · 5h ago
I’ve eaten alone in hundreds of places in dozens of countries, not sure where these mythical places are.
No comments yet
chrisweekly · 8h ago
"Table for one" is nearly always accommodated. Bringing a family of 4 or 5 out, and you're much more likely to be denied, or to suffer a long wait.
ghaff · 8h ago
And, in fact, if there's a bar where they serve food that makes it even easier.
ghaff · 8h ago
I mean, you almost always can? During COVID, there was a certain degree of reservations required--min 2 people. But it's pretty darned rare. And I say this as someone who has eaten out solo many hundreds of times. (And tend to eat at fairly decent restaurants.)
SamBam · 8h ago
> Higher costs in every aspect of life
...except for the average $300,000 cost of raising a child in the US. That one would seem to rather balance out all those others.
carlosjobim · 8h ago
> blended average
...is of course great when you personally are on the side benefitting.
encoderer · 7h ago
In other news, gas stations are selling individual cigarettes for $0.50 each
lordfrito · 9h ago
Apparently the article author hasn't heard about the concept of a "group discount"
josephcsible · 9h ago
The point is that the extent of the group discount is absurd. E.g., the ORD-LEX one, $214 for a single ticket, and then only $1 more for a second one.
Aurornis · 9h ago
I’ve been pricing tickets for a family trip recently and I have not seen anything that extreme.
That’s definitely a cherry picked example for the article, not the common scenario.
jjcob · 8h ago
Yeah, typically groups pay more per ticket than individuals.
This is probably only on unpopular routes where they know they aren't going to fill the plane.
kubectl_h · 8h ago
If you read the article than you'd understand it's about degree of discount to which two or more passengers are receiving. In some cases two tickets is almost as cheap as one ticket. If these prices converge it would actually make sense to buy two tickets for one traveler if you value comfort and can afford it.
dbuxton · 8h ago
Although in this case you actually have to be accompanied by another adult
paulgb · 9h ago
Part of what makes it seem shady here is that airline ticket prices are pretty opaque. If they advertised it as a group discount, it would be received differently.
kenjackson · 8h ago
Airline pricing in general is pretty opaque. Not hospital pricing opaque, but still pretty opaque. It's one of the few things we regularly purchase where the price changes almost daily (both up and down). For example, bus and train tickets are pretty much the same price each day for the same route. For airlines, I'll often check the price on some future night to see if it is cheaper or not.
wwweston · 8h ago
Like medicine, the price is a negotiation point in a complex web of probabilities. Air travel can be more transparent because the probability network is simpler and the spread is narrower, but they’re both dealing with realities of providing predictable service under volatile demand and group payer conditions.
ghaff · 8h ago
Distance train at least may (or may not depending on location/country) be quite a bit cheaper for advance purchase but maybe doesn't fluctuate as much day to day.
ttoinou · 8h ago
Maybe even if it was a possibility before, it wasn't used and now airlines have enough data and market power to actually make different prices for groups
(By the way, if it's about inflating prices for individual, then it's not really volume discounting... it just appears this way on the outside)
tiffanyh · 8h ago
Is volume-based discounts really that surprising?
lvl155 · 8h ago
Airlines need to be regulated and treated like public utility which is exactly what they are.
crazygringo · 7h ago
No they aren't. Public utilities generally give you only one choice of provider, which is why they need to be regulated because of their monopoly status.
When you fly, you usually have a choice between lots of airlines. So there's nothing "public utility" about it whatsoever.
Airports, on the other hand, are considered public infrastructure. There are also sometimes routes that are only served by one airline, which are sometimes regulated accordingly. But that isn't the general case, nor should it be.
diebeforei485 · 3h ago
Taxi companies, moving companies, and rideshare are all considered utilities and there are generally multiple choices of provider. Being a monopoly is not a requirement to be a utility.
guhidalg · 8h ago
I think the governments only role is to guarantee the planes don’t fall out of the sky or crash into each other, and then the airlines can price compete.
The problem with this isn't the difference in prices - charging less for buying in bulk is a normal thing that's probably been done by merchants since the invention of money.
The problem with this is the lack of communication. There's no advertisement of a bulk/family discount at any point during the pricing process, you just see a different price. That's the problem here, not the price difference itself.
My theory is that most same-day travel is for business, and businesses are far less price-sensitive than consumers and will just pay whatever.
I suspect this is what's going on here. Most solo travellers are for business, not consumers for holidays. The price difference here is huge – almost half – which is far beyond a bulk discount, we're talking about 1 person vs 2 people.
That's also why none of this is advertised: it's not a discount, but a "we think you can pay more, so we'll charge you more" type of thing.
Is that a good/bad/ethical/predatory thing? I don't know. Leaves kind of a bad taste for me though.
Without price discrimination, there is one price, and then there are two triangles "left" of the price: What consumers would have paid, but don't need to, that's the consumer surplus (between price and demand), and what producers would have sold for, but got more for, that's the producer surplus (between price and supply).
With price discrimination, what happens is that the producers "grab" some of that consumer surplus for themselves (as "price" is not a horizontal line anymore, but gets closer to the demand line).
So this is bad for consumers, good for producers. However, the producers can use the surplus to subsidize products for poorer consumers, so that a higher quantity of goods is sold.
Having said that, the airline market is very weird (oligopoly character, very perishable goods, ...)
Minimum stay durations, like advance purchase restrictions, are a common part of fare construction.
> That's also why none of this is advertised: it's not a discount, but a "we think you can pay more, so we'll charge you more" type of thing.
A surcharge for X vs a discount for ~X is the same thing, it's just how it's presented.
Technically all of this is advertised, it's published in GDS. People just don't really want to read the fare rules because it's boring and a ton of reading.
I don't know how a normal person would have access to any of them. They're described as being offered via subscription to businesses.
https://www.bookingninjas.com/blog/gds-system-top-reasons-wh...
[edit] You can probably see them on ITA Matrix too, I can't remember.
First off airlines are an extremely low margin business.
AA's net margin is 1.26%, Delta's net margin is 5.91%, United's net margin is 6.43%, Alaska's net margin is 2.86%. These aren't exactly blockbuster SaaS numbers.
Demand and competition absolutely drive price reductions - competitive routes have much lower revenue per available seat mile - and adjusted for inflation air travel is wildly cheaper than it used to be. Since 1995 the cumulative inflation-adjusted price of domestic air travel is down almost 37%. [1] Thanks to competition you can fly from SFO to NYC for $99, non-stop, next month. On the other hand SFO to GUM is $1662 ($1100 on a half round trip basis), because there's no competition.
Airlines with both a domestic and international route network tend to lose money on their domestic routes and make up for it on their flagship international routes, but even still, they make most of their money on frequent flier programs and credit card relationships.
St Louis Fed has a good write-up on the economics of air travel. [2]
[1] https://www.bts.gov/content/annual-us-domestic-average-itine...
[2] https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/page-one-economics/2...
It feels more like a test of a strategy to fill middle seats.
It is a natural result of our economic system. Economists call it "extracting consumer surplus," and there are several mechanisms companies employ to get the population to pay them the maximum amount of money. Airlines indeed use the information they have about you and the flight you're booking to guess the maximum amount you'll pay- and that's the price they show you.
Obviously we, as consumers, feel taken advantage of because we wish we could pay less (and keep the surplus to ourselves). But this is going to happen in any capitalist system.
You can't advertise prices that constantly change.
It would be weird to specifically advertise this. Unlike say, buying a second pair of shoes - not many people will buy an extra plane ticket to save 30% off both.
With something like airfares, the business is still doing its half of negotiations: collecting bits of data about the buyer to determine a price; but, crucially, there’s no real way for the buyer to “talk back” and so the process seems arbitrary.
Not really. The "negotiation" is still there. Time limited discounts weed out consumers who need something immediately. Coupons weed out people who aren't willing to put the legwork to find them. Loyalty programs and app-based offers (eg. McDonalds) take all of this to the next level by sending targeted coupons based on whatever demographic/behavioral information they can glean from you.
That was kind of the premise of a movie I watched last night where a couples retreat offered a group discount for 4 couples or something.
So I could see it being "Bring your friends for 30% off!" being a cool summer promotion to beach destinations or something.
The same way they have been observed to offer higher prices to iPhone users at times
They come up with schemes to rake in money based on market segmentation they run numbers on and have their booking systems setup in a way to make price comparison "difficult" for a normal user.
In all honesty all this thread is people complaining about something they don't have a clue about. Airline pricing is insanely complicated, and this is for a reason. Airlines are not a luxury business, they barely manage to survive. If not all this dynamic pricing, special contracts with agencies, etc, they'd have to charge so much for a seat that you wouldn't pay and all this travel industry you are accustomed to simply wouldn't exist. The whole business is built on making somebody who crucially needs to fly pay as much, as he can, and then to make price attractive enough for the rest of us so that you can sell the rest of the tickets, so that flight can make any profit. And in the end, margins are super thin in this business.
Also, your question implies that you imagine that there is some simple enough "true price for a seat", which is so far from the truth, you have no idea. If you actually look at the price breakdown for a given ticket, there are literally dozens of components in it. It's not unusual that so called "fare" of a ticket (which is, like, "just price") may be literally $1, and the rest of $300 is various taxes, surcharges and payoffs I won't even try to start to explain here.
I mean, really, people here truly have no idea what they are complaining about. Airline pricing is not a thing you should hate.
Here they don't even advertise it as a discount, so there's no ethical problem with raising the individual traveler price by x and lowering the family price by y so that the total profit remains the same.
One, there isn’t. One party undercutting another for the same product is how competition generates consumer surplus.
Two, it isn’t the same product. When I fly with my family, we check in together. We board together. I collect their docs on my phone and double check they have them on theirs. I turn down upgrades so I can sit with them. If there is a change, it takes one customer service agent maybe 10% longer to adjust everyone in bulk. I’m not incurring 4 or 5x the cost on the airline for 4 to 5x the revenue, this is why bulk discounting exists for everything.
This isn’t an ethical problem. If it’s triggering an ethical system, that’s more damning for the system than for Delta. This is a communication and brand problem.
There's an even bigger fairness issue when there's such a huge data knowledge gap between the parties, both knowing that there is this hidden price structure as well as knowing a ton about you. So there's privacy implications too.
Edit: it's not undercutting. It's price discrimination. You know the thing people fucking hate when trying to buy a car. Half the reason people liked buying Tesla is cause the price is the price is the price.
Transparent pricing worked as a positive differentiator for cars. (Saturn. Tesla.)
I believe airlines have tried their hand at it. But it doesn’t budge the needle. If there is a single enduring truth to at least American airline demand, it’s that most consumers will pick the cheapest ticket. Almost nothing else matters, when it comes time to pay for it, to almost all of the flying public.
There might be some benefits to price discrimination (which is in effect what a point systems achieves) but the collective time wasted dicking around with points isn’t worth it. Make all point systems illegal.
If you want to buy anything and just pick the first option then you probably will have worse results than someone that did research. Or someone that used coupons. Or someone that waited for a sale. Or someone that bought used. Etc etc
We obviously shouldn’t make all those behaviors illegal. There is an inherent time/money trade off in life. It’s actually the whole basis for economic activity (ie it’s why employers are able to pay you to do stuff for them) so stopping it would probably be quite bad.
The problem comes when the original seller doesn't want their price discrimination scheme to be thwarted by efficiency-improving arbitrageurs and takes measures to prevent that, because that's rent-seeking behavior and shouldn't be tolerated.
The airline wastes resources on their end, and so do the consumers. They're both doing what they're incentivized to do, but that's not what's actually efficient for society. The whole point of a good economy is that these two are always pulled into alignment (Efficient Market Hypothesis), but ours has failed in this case.
It was fascinating to chat with the software engineers at ITA Software.[0] Turns out flight routing (which everyone knows "should be" just a simple A*) is actually NP-Hard because of how convoluted the airline pricing systems are. At that company it was obviously a group of super smart people solving super hard problems..... and for what?
This is Kurt Vonnegut Jr's "Dynamic tension": muscles working against muscles, with no work being done. This is what Bullshit Jobs (good title, disappointing book) should have been written about.
To quote Eisenhower, this (lesser) scourge also
Maybe an outright ban isn't the best intervention (and maybe it is), but I'm certain denial of the underlying problem will yield us zero progress.[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29425650 or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software
Which is adjacent to: Nearly everyone loses, because the house knows the odds and controls the terms and conditions of the rewards.
This is false. https://x.com/patio11/status/1902555603534295115
If you're going to claim "the general consensus", [citation needed]. A more likely claim is "more people have read the misinformation from the Atlantic than have read the correct refutation from a domain expert on credit cards", which is sadly probably true.
And Twitter doesn’t show threads unless you’re logged in btw, so you just linked Patrick’s opinion.
(Also, the argument is not "credit cards are fair". The argument is "credit card reward programs are not a subsidy of the rich by the poor".)
> And Twitter doesn’t show threads unless you’re logged in btw, so you just linked Patrick’s opinion.
Fair point, thank you.
Some highlights of the thread, assuming that each directly linked tweet can be loaded:
Citation for people with more money spending more: https://x.com/patio11/status/1902556736956903589 (linking to https://www.bls.gov/cex/tables.htm ).
The rich are paying far more of the "payment system overhead" of merchants than the poor are: https://x.com/patio11/status/1902556925826416841 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902557078222176449 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902557151807119735 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902557413275775295
Identifying the key question: https://x.com/patio11/status/1902557654603415768 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902557795800498477
Quoting and questioning the Atlantic's claim that rewards programs aren't funded by interchange: https://x.com/patio11/status/1902558008283992313 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902558055310434325
Citation refuting this: https://x.com/patio11/status/1902558157169152158
Quoting relevant charts and data from the citation: https://x.com/patio11/status/1902558268070711311 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902558360530002094
Claim (not specifically citation-backed) that in fact one group getting a subsidy is lower-income consumers during macroeconomic shocks: https://x.com/patio11/status/1902559088631771397 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902559166729802088
Observation that while wealthier people get higher-reward cards supported by interchange, poorer people get free checking supported by interchange: https://x.com/patio11/status/1902559216214134798 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902559349655982387 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902559372758155325 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902559469470412913
Refutation of another part of the Atlantic article (article claims credit-card companies "make lucrative deals with airlines and hotel chains", but credit card companies pay for those deals, not the other way around): https://x.com/patio11/status/1902559896400203987 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902560051644002726 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902560160632963217 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902560257282335024 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902560386395545603 .
Patrick doesn't really dispute this, but tries to argue that this doesn't matter because rich people pay more in absolute terms, so they're not getting "subsidized". Maybe this is just word lawyering over what "subsidize" means, but most people would characterize this arrangement as at least "unfair", even though rich people are paying more in absolute terms.
He also points to some graphs about how from the point of the view of card issuers, the middle customers are actually the ones being subsidized, not the rich or the poor. That might be true, but is totally unrelated to the original original point, which is about what effective price (ie. price paid - cashback) consumers are getting at shops. Moreover, the fact that they're getting a subsidy from the card issuer doesn't preclude from them getting a subsidy from the store itself.
And the thread counters that in several ways: rich people spend more in total at the store so their interchange costs are more than made up for by actual spending; and poor people are getting different rewards in exchange for the interchange system, such as free checking/banking (which was made free by using interchange fees to subsidize it so there aren't monthly fees).
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the financial system overall is particularly fair. If you want cases where it's extremely unfair, a target-rich environment would be bank accounts that have fees that just so happen to disproportionately affect poorer people (e.g. overdraft fees).
But credit card reward programs aren't a case of transferring money from poor individual cardholders to rich individual cardholders; credit cards are a case of transferring money from poor and "rich" cardholders to ultra-rich credit card companies. The right target for the ire, there, is the credit card company, not the "rich" individual cardholders. This is a standard divide-and-conquer tactic: better to pit low-income and high-income people against each other, rather than cast attentions on the very large companies that have constructed a system to profit heavily from both of them.
You're not forced. This allows them to make extra money from people who don't bother, and offer discounts to price conscious people.
Time is money. Convenience too.
If points systems caused losses then nobody would have them. They’re money makers, and that money is coming from someone’s pocket.
It sounds like you believe the losses are coming from the people who _have_ the points? That doesn't seem likely to me.
It would be a better analysis to say "it's complicated" -
* Business travelers earn personally-owned points on their company spending. In this case, the company might be paying higher prices but the individual is being incentivized to continue that because the miles are essentially a kickback.
* Personal travelers have an incentive to travel with the same airline for more points, so a kind of lock-in for either (1) those who are not as sensitive to price differences or: (2) those for whom the benefits of the points are high enough to outweigh some higher costs acquiring them.
* In the same vein, a points system that encourages a traveler to stay with the same airline can give _that airline_ greater profits from _that consumer_, even if on a per-flight basis the airline might hypothetically be making less. It's like Costco selling stuff for a cheaper unit price.
Instead I’d rather focus on human nature and induced behaviour.
When mcdonald's offers 2 burgers for the price of one, they make money because people who wouldn’t normally eat at mcdonald’s show up.
When airlines offer points, they make money because people who normally wouldn’t book flights end up booking them. Even if the points are a good deal, you end up spending more money than you normally would because you’re enticed by the points.
> to get the full value of my money.
No one is forced to understand the system, but that means leaving some indeterminate amount of money/value in the hands of the predatory airline.
If you wanna save money, you figure it out. If you don't wanna figure it out, you leave money on the table.
They're selling (negative) convenience, but that's pretty much by design.
They do it by selling data, by points expiring, and by often only allowing points when seats would be empty otherwise.
And often retailers pay more at POS terminals!
This all ties into any rewards program. It's part of the package, even if points are granted for use.
This is really the whole point. The sale of data is much less lucrative than the purchases by the customers themselves, especially for the "nicer" cards.
If you are a CC company with wealthy clientele, they tend to spend more. This means that retailers are willing to offer deals/rewards to attract those clients, and also that you want to offer rewards to keep those clients.
This is why e.g. American Express has cards with great rewards, high annual card fees to keep the riffraff away, and retailers willing to take a larger % cut in order to have those cardholders shop at their store where they presumably purchase more.
At the high end it actually diminishes. Rewards cards targeting middle of the distribution are more lucrative, generally. Citi Double Cash gets you 2% cash back on purchases whereas the Amex Platinum gets you 1X on all spend worth at most 1.25% (and 5X on airfare).
It’s more a sunk cost/commitment thing. Their approvals department keeps away low and inconsistent spenders.
Just because some people won’t buy anything that isn’t on a coupon doesn’t mean coupons are bad.
Because you can save money by getting a cheaper flight by understanding how pricing works and adapting your purchasing strategy. Many consumer are willing to spend time and effort getting a better deal.
This can be true even if the lower price is nominally a discount. Before everybody would pay $100. Now you can pay $80 by screwing around but have to pay $150 otherwise, and the screwing around is $40 worth of inconvenience. $40 is less than the $70 difference between $80 and $150, but $80 plus a $40 inconvenience is a higher cost than the original $100 uniform price, and obviously so is $150.
Which is bad for consumers and the broader economy.
It’s no different than clipping coupons or waiting till closing time to get pastries at a discount.
Since air travel was substantially more expensive then than now, the amenities gravitated to what attracted the most frequent fliers: businessmen. So stewardesses (they certainly weren't called flight attendants then) had weight limits, age limits, and if-you're-married-you-must-quit deals, and as a glance at some 1970s uniforms will show you, they were basically hiring models who happened to have the right skill set (usually at least one would be a trained nurse, and they all had to be reasonably confident) to dress them in revealing outfits. Like Hooters for travel.
If that's what you want, great. If you'd prefer other amenities... maybe not.
It has never struck me as coincidental that smoking was banned on US aircraft before no-smoking policies became nigh-universal at restaurants, but in just about the right timeframe for airplanes to shift from a boys' club to a place that catered to families.
If you want to pay more to get more, there are a lot of options, starting with coach plus (coach seats, business class legroom, priority boarding) and going through first class before branching out into niches like all-first-class flights (JSX is an airline in the US for which this is the business model; they fly smaller regional-size planes, and the reduced capacity legally allows them to skip the whole TSA and terminal experience and just let you on the plane if you show up and buy a ticket twenty minutes before departure) and then on into the various levels of chartered and truly private aviation.
You do, definitely, get what you pay for, but sometimes you don't need a Michelin-starred meal experience. And when that's the case, you've got cheaper options that didn't exist before deregulation (except for Southwest, which avoided problems by not making interstate flights at all in the early days.
For example, if Delta went under, Atlanta, Detroit and Salt Lake City would lose a total of 50%+ of their flights. That would be absolutely devastating.
If we allowed markets to become monopolized we have to deal with that when the bill comes due rather than kick the can down the road.
On domestic tickets there's no YQ, YR or embedded Q surcharges anyways.
Domestic airfare in the US is down 36% adjusted for inflation since 1995. [1]
Even base tier status concentrated flying with any one carriers get you a waived checked bag, and so does pretty much any airline credit card. So basically you shouldn't pay more than $95 a year in checked baggage fees.
US airlines generally have sub-5% net margins which is why they find themselves in creditor protection every decade or so when the market turns. There's a long-running adage about investing in airlines.
[1] https://www.bts.gov/content/annual-us-domestic-average-itine...
$70 ($35 both ways) on a $300 flight isn't that small. And again, that's not the only fee.
See also: hotels adding "resort fees".
It’s hardly the only fee, either.
Net profit was $6.7B meaning literally all of their net revenue (a total of 2.25% of gross revenue) was accounted for from these ancillary fees.
But their inflation-adjusted cost went down 36% since 1995.
There were a total of about 1 billion emplanements by US carriers in 2024, ish, so we're talking about a total of about $6 per passenger per year. They really are insignificant.
I mean, yeah, sure. Capitalism is totally stupid and wasteful and evil. Any proposals? Oh wait, no, I'm afraid I don't really want to hear any proposals on this subject. I sincerely wish we don't have to live in interesting times. (Alas, I'm afraid it's past the point we could wish that anyway, so…)
One flight will get you to your sister's wedding on time. The other won't. They don't have equivalent value, they can't be freely exchanged.
But someone should totally make a site for finding strangers to book the same flight with :)
Otherwise I would buy seats for my personal helium balloons on either side of me.
Anyway I’ll be across the aisle with hydrogen balloons paying less than you either way. Enjoy your flight!
- Taking up more than one seat with girth, needing a seatbelt extender.
- Fitting through narrow passages, tight turns, limited headroom
- An unconscious person may need to be lifted, and transported somehow
- Toilets and life vests and other safety equipment, rated for your "standard average man size"
- Total mass of passengers/cargo, and its distribution on the aircraft itself
Elevators in the US have a maximum weight and maximum occupancy rating.
Arguably, if obesity is a disability, then appeal to the Americans with Disability Act or similar regulations, but from a standpoint of safety and the common good, it does not seem unreasonable for airlines to charge extra to cover their expenses above.
Unusually large or small sizes can end up more expensive (and/or only manufactured in limited quantities) because they're not commonly bought and they take up space on the shop floor and in inventory which could be used for things with higher turnover. (Edit: Also at the extreme ends of sizing simply enlarging or shrinking the pattern won't work well, you have to redraft it so it sits correctly on a petite or plus-sized frame).
Economic argument: fat people are more likely to make use of on-board food service despite high markup, so you want as many of them as possible.
On a flight to Greenland I spent six hours smashed up between the window and a stranger (constant, sweaty, skin-on-skin contact) because they put three fat guys right next to each other on a full flight. I'd rather have taken a couple months of vacation and ridden the icebreaker in.
People are flaky, and being on the same itinerary with the same PNR as someone else means your trip is in their hands.
What's remarkable here is that airlines waited this long to do it. Sad news for me as a usually solo traveler who prizes flexibility, but I understand airlines wanting to prioritize groups and more locked-in fares.
Remember the really old days when air miles were awarded solely by distance flown rather than by dollars paid? This made no business sense. It meant that someone who flew the cheapest tickets could rack up as many points as a last-minute first class business traveller who spent massively more ticket.
With the airlines I’m familiar with, it seems that pricing anomaly has been corrected. Air miles are much more correlated with the price of the ticket these days. Eg., you don’t even get air miles on the cheapest tickets on one airline I know.
But I still wonder why the airline industry created an air miles formula so disconnected from the value of the passenger in the early days.
"Congratulations! You flew 100,000 miles with us!"
"Congratulations! You spent $100,000 with us!"
I actually prefer the miles per $ model since it seems more fair for everyone. Obviously it’s less exploitable but that’s exactly the sort of thing everyone is complaining about.
But when I travel, it's not like I'm gonna call up my buddy and ask him if he'll join me on a flight so I can get a better ticket price. And if I'm going on vacation with my family, I'm not going to buy individual tickets, like why would I do that?
With even moderate airline status rebooking/cancellations work more or less as described. I can’t recall the last time I haven’t been credited for a flight I ended up not taking, even I did a full on no-show.
Without status airlines sell refundable tickets with similar flexible rules, but I assume there is some adverse selection included in how they need to price those fares.
Realistically most frequent travelers go for business and they don’t care about cost that much so subscription packs wouldn’t be valuable. That’s why loyalty programs instead offer non monetary perks or those that accrue to the individual (points).
- That it's still way cheaper in most instances to book a return (especially where the "trip" straddles a weekend) rather than a one-way fare when travelling long haul - even if you just throw away the return flight.
- That you can sometimes get access to totally different inventory by booking a package including accommodation, even if that accommodation is one night in a shared dormitory in a hostel (which you just don't go to).
At least group discounts have a recognizable economic rationale. But in these examples you are getting a strict superset of the same SKU (OK, maybe the change rules might be a little tighter, but not in a way that's perceptible) for less money.
My guess is the airlines think one-way people are business folks (so the price doesn't matter because it's getting expensed), whereas return travelers are paying their own way
One way business 6,032 Swiss francs.
Round trip business (with a return 6 months later) was 2,530 Swiss francs. So I screenshotted the horrible one-way price to go in my expense report, and then booked the round trip ticket.
So… you committed fraud? Cool?
I’m all for sticking it to the corporate overlords, but careful how far out you stick your neck.
You might be able to find an airline where it doesn't happen, but you will definitely find airlines where it does. Just verified with Delta and British airways and Lufthansa
But yes, in terms of money, it sure is waste to pay more for the flight.
I also don't find this particularly outrageous. Lots of companies do volume discounts, and traveling as a family gets very expensive very fast.
Finally, the fare bucket system used to price flights usually works the other way to penalize groups. If there's 3 seats left in the cheapest bucket, and you try to book for 4, you don't get 3 cheapest plus 1 more expensive, your entire group gets priced at the more expensive bucket.
Business traveler maybe. Not my money and business stuff happens. (Usually they want you to book non-refundable because it comes out ahead in the end.)
Which is why the people involved take good care to prevent anything from getting in the way of those plans.
If you miss your flight when travelling solo, you disappoint only yourself. With a family the number of disappointed people increases accordingly.
From my anecdata, being single greatly increases your chances of being bumped off a full flight. And it's a lot cheaper and easier to compensate/redirect one person than a family of four.
I did once have an airline offer me something like $1500 USD and 50,000 bonus miles if I was willing to cancel my flight, but that was days in advance.
I'm not sure that's true. The airlines are gambling that at least one person will miss the flight for whatever reason, and they'll get away with overbooking.
But, of course, when they loose that gamble, it's really a passenger that looses. The house always wins.
Not always the case, you could be physically removed from the plane because the flight is full:
https://www.flyertalk.com/articles/overbooked-united-flight-...
When I rebooked, the airline gave me a credit for the round trip flight in total. I only had to book a one way ticket on the last leg, so I obviously was able to "afford" the flight without additional expenditure on my part.
You used to see "surcharge for visa" but visa made that illegal.
So now you see "discount for cash/debit", and everyone is happy!
Coordination with others also makes booking take longer and tends to fix dates and locations, which makes it hard to grab a deal when they come up.
Typically people plan in this order:
1. Where to go
2. When to go
3. Check airfare
Flip it on its head:
1. Keep an eye out for cheap flights from your home airport
2. Pick one of those destinations
3. Choose when to go
Not exactly inverted, but the flight goes from last to first.
I had Ireland in my head for my next trip, but then Italy showed up last week. That sounded pretty good, so I checked the dates and found a flight that fit in my schedule, and booked it.
It’s not great for getting a flight around a conference, wedding, or some other event you are planning around. But when you know you want to take a vacation to somewhere and sometime this year, it can cut flight costs in half.
A single flight ends up paying for the cost of the subscription 10x over, and then some.
Also, it could be somewhere near where you want to go. I had tickets to Croatia about 5 years ago, but hand to cancel due to the pandemic. I didn’t know anything about Croatia when I booked, but I figured the worst case scenario was I catch a quick ferry or flight over to Italy once I’m there. Once you’re over there it’s cheap to go one country over. That flight to Croatia was $289, that cheaper than a flight to Nashville for me, which is only about an 8 hour drive.
I did the same thing when I booked a flight to Sweden. I didn’t know if I’d like it there, so from there I booked a connection to Copenhagen for next to nothing. I spent a week in Copenhagen, but then ultimately did go back to Sweden for week, which I ended up loving. I’m glad I didn’t spend the whole trip in Copenhagen.
Another deal I got that stood out was to Tokyo. I think I paid around $550 give or take. A coworker of mine has family there and goes on a regular basis, he was floored by that price. He always pays over $1k, and usually closer to $1,500.
Ultimately it’s just an alert service for flights that are abnormally low. If you have a specific destination in mind, Google Flights is pretty good at showing when the cheapest time to travel is, giving a booking date of today. Of course it fluctuates over time, which is where the alerts come in.
It’s saved me thousands. Though I probably would have only taken about 20% of the trips I have without it.
I got my own flight tickets by looking on my own though.
550 USD for Tokyo is so cool, wow
Group 1 seats cost 100 dollars Group 2 seats cost 110 dollars ... Group 10 seats are 350 dollars
Your group order got the last seats in group N and the first seats in group N+1
This is where the myth of "booking late gets you the cheapest seats" comes from. If an early booking passenger cancels their Group 1 seat it becomes available to buy again and it is still a group 1 seat even if every other seat has been sold. So late cancellations can make cheap seats available again.
We need a passenger bill of rights, not just for the airlines, but also how passengers are treated in airports, by security, and concrete cause of action for consumers when airlines misbehave.
We have a Sam's Club membership because buying in bulk is cheaper.
Edit: checked prices Sam's vs Meijer
As a business traveler I actually want the price to be as high as possible while satisfying the company rules on airfare. The fare is fully reimbursed, so a higher fare means I get more points on my credit card.
Now the company rules on airfare will probably reference something like the least-cost logical fare. So it is in a business traveler's interest for all airlines to raise prices simultaneously.
Business travel is weird.
"It's just another way for airlines to continue 'segmenting' their customers, charging business travelers paying with a corporate card more while offering a better deal to families on the exact same flight."
You're the kind of person forcing people to be separate just to try and get one over others. The type leaving their bag on the seat as a method of protecting your seat in the bus.
You also probably justify it as some sort of pragmatic thing but you're just selfish and inconsiderate.
Anyone being upset about this is just looking for reasons to be upset and maybe should go outside more and get a hobby.
If you are going to book for 3 passengers they charge three of you with the next level, more expensive fare.
But so far my favorite is they force you to buy seat if you travel with infant. You cannot select free random seat as their planes have rules to allow infants only on the seat near the window.
Larger groups are more price sensitive. They should pay less because they have more buying power when they buy ahead.
I think the explanation is wrong and the author is jumping to conclusions. Airlines have long offered "bulk" discounts. Their goal is to fill as many seats on a flight as possible. What we are seeing here is their group pricing creep into their direct sales.
You go to a bakery and he charges more because you wear a suit. You go to Europe, a guy in front of you buys a bread for €1, but same bread is €3 because you are tourist? Then you go to buy a toilet paper and same thing happens again because your ass is worth more?
Author will lose their mind when they buy 10+ of the same thing from AliExpress.
> Whenever this pricing strategy began, this is a massive change in how airlines set prices – and one that will likely catch many travelers off guard.
> Unlike shopping at retail stores or Costco, bulk discounts are unusual for airlines – at least not just for booking just two passengers instead of one. And these higher fares for one passenger are the opposite of what we typically see, where travelers booking for two passengers or more wind up getting charged more per person than a single passenger.
This isn't strictly true. Airlines have long offered bulk pricing through travel agencies and booking partners.
If the plane is on a popular route, you'll pay through the nose, and there sure as hell won't be any group discounts. You'll pay almost full price for a two year old, because they know they'll fill the plane no matter what.
And as a father of 2 small kids not complaining at all, having multiple kids these days is brutal also financially, any small thing that helps is very much appreciated.
Yes and as a solo person I can choose to buy those and take advantage of it in the same way a family can. Usually it's consumables like a 6 pack of bagels or something that might cost $5 which I'll 100% use.
This airline approach comes off much different, because as a solo traveler there is no benefit or reason why I would ever buy 2 tickets to save $80 per ticket since I wouldn't get any value from it and the cost of 2 tickets even with a discount will be greater than 1 non-discounted ticket.
Most airlines seem to also charge to pick your seats. I wonder if people who travel as a group end up paying that discount back to sit together.
i wonder how low birthrate societies like Japan or South Korea are like, is it worse to improve birthrates? or is it better because being single isn't an anomaly?
More importantly, the number of single/solo people isn't even low in the US. If i had to ballpark it, at least a quarter of the population is like that. Lots of married people travel solo for business for example. Why aren't some airlines playing capitalism well by offering "business elite" flights where solo travelers get a loyalty discount and there are no children on the flight? Not for all destinations but at least popular ones like to vegas or NYC <-> LAX.
Pre-Covid there were a couple airlines playing around with business class only flights from NY to LA.
Solo business travelers are where the money is made. The rest of the seats tend to exist at cost or even below to fill up the plane. Airlines would be pretty foolish to try to lower margin on the least price sensitive class of traveler they service.
People will look at this as penalizing single travelers and want everyone to have the lowest fare, but that’s not the real alternative. A flat fare would bring solo prices down and group rates up so the blended average is the same.
Traveling solo essentially costs double automatically because of lodging, and it kind of sucks there’s a double whammy with airfare where, unlike lodging, the penalty doesn’t actually make any sense.
I guess as a family be grateful that all hotel rooms come with a 50% (or more) discount per traveler?
Most single people own and sleep in double beds, so there's no sense in which a double bed is "designed to accomodate" two travellers.
The issue is more that discounted single room rates would encourage unofficial double stays, which would lose significant income.
I often book a double for myself (often for the same price or €10 more) for a bigger bed.
Hostels are for this market, no? Share physical infra (bathroom/heating/walls) with other humans (aka strangers) and you get the same family discount. You're not obligated to pay the premium unless you want your own bathroom and own personal space like families tend to want
As in: families don't get a discount, they just amortise the cost of privacy that you also seem to specifically need/want. but many solo travellers don't care to pay for that.
But if you're traveling with your family, just get hotel rooms. Hostels only came up in the first place in response to a gripe about solo travel.
I’ve seen a couple where they have a few solo cabins, but the amount of effort to surface this stuff turns me off to the whole thing.
The only reason I’m still half looking is that it seems like the easiest way for a random person to set foot on Antarctica, which would be a cool thing to check off the bucket list.
Cruises are probably more complicated because they price things other than your cabin into the "experience." (Though I think the Queen Mary 2 a few years back was slightly less than 2x for just me.) But the random Marriott doesn't really care if there is one of you or two when it comes to pricing.
Maybe that's the problem. Cruises rely on people spending a lot of extra money onboard the ship, or drink packages, nicer dinners, excursions, etc... fewer people doing that, with less social pressure to spend extra, means less money for them and they have to make it up somewhere.
I imagine 2 people use roughly twice the bedding, towels, toiletries, etc., on average.
You can easily verify this on Booking.com, where the search results show price per room and how it varies based on how many people are in that room and whether they're adults or children.
I'll say over the years most places do not respect the "if the towel is not on the floor don't replace it". I'm fine with reusing a towel to dry off twice, but some hotels change them every day, even when their signage is indicating a protocol to prevent that sort of waste.
also: be sure to make offerings to the sea gods before sailing because crossing the Drake Passage can be... exciting.
When I went there, I booked the cheapest bed (maybe $6500 in 2013) in a three-person cabin. It was early season and the ship wasn't full, so the company filled it with backpackers waiting for last-minute discounts in the hostels of Ushuaia. Because I had paid the full price, they upgrade me two classes to a much nicer two-person cabin. And then halfway through the trip, the ship delivered some staff to a museum. The other guy got their cabin, and I got the one we had shared.
There were quite a few solo travelers we met on the cruise, though - I think they mostly had solo inside cabins with no view.
Also the more people on the ship means more chances of selling high margin add ons like drink packages, excursions and so on.
Cruises are for folks, how to say it politely... who gave up on any form of adventure or excitement in their lives. Dont be that person, not yet at least.
Most of the more profitable markets have high competition not only by other airlines but also other forms of transportation. Very few airlines are swimming in cash and even those are only a couple bad years away from bankrupcy.
Most people are ok with terrible service because they save money.
Doesn't stop them from complaining, though.
And yes, "cheapest" includes taxes and all fees.
You can fly from New York to Paris non-stop for $150 if you are patient and flexible. (Please please please call me a liar.)
If you are not patient $500 is more typical.
Twenty years ago was a $800 ticket.
Thirty years ago that was a $1000 ticket.
And you are not a liar - but your claim isn't true at all in Europe - see increased per-flight legislated fees and the loss of budget airlines. Price of flights between 2 destinations has increased by 25-40% in the last 5 years in most of Europe.
Thanks to efforts like increasing the per-flight fees "because of high inflation" (these fee increases are still going up several years later): https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/why-travel... and loss of airlines like Flybe.
You can still get the madly cheap hop flights, but they are often pricing in income from our flights (or accepting even negative returns by pricing above the per-flight fees) because the planes need to be where you are going to fly a profitable flight later.
So the old status quo where genuinely cheap flights could be booked on a 7 day basis (e.g. cheap thursday-thursday flights) has been replaced by convoluted patterns to get the cheap flights (you usually need to leave on Monday, return on Saturday (if your source airport has lower demand than the destination) or vice versa. I suggest based on flights in the US becoming cheaper, that this is due to government intervention.
I get saving the environment and all that. But let me pay more taxes monthly, don't charge the airline £15 minimum making a bunch of flights unviable. Don't make booking a holiday or conference flight so unpleasant and annoying. I always have to tradeoff wasting a day or two with paying 50-150 euros extra.
It's not the worlds biggest problem, but making that decision is a regular additional dilemma I didn't want in my life. I wish for the days when you could get just normal timetabled flights at good costs if the month (e.g. February) was unpopular for travel. Now those months really aren't cheaper.
Round trips in September are $386-500 depending on the day and duration of the stay. The $386 fare was for a tuesday-to-tuesday week stay and I might just take it, I will be bumping up against use-or-lose limits for PTO by then. There are fewer crowds in September and the weather is really nice.
https://imgur.com/Wn43raL
Personally, I do argue that it's worth it having tickets 10% more expensive and forcing the companies to always allocate all passengers, treat people humanely and etc. It's even worth it the 25% increase to make them let people carry luggage and avoid all the troubles that come with the optionality. But most governments seem to disagree.
You are asking for people who fly without checked luggage (as I usually do) to subsidize you.
You can make the argument that airlines are companies that sell in flight beverages and also happen to fly a passenger airplane. The actual profit comes from an unusual sources, like deals with credit card issues for a "rewards" program that gives you frequent flyer miles
With exceptions, once you have paid for a ticket all commercial passenger airlines are obligated to transport you under their contract of carriage.
All airlines must do this, I even looked up the contract of carriage for the shittiest airline I could think of and Frontier has this to say:
>Involuntary -- If insufficient passengers volunteer, passengers who cannot be accommodated on the flight will be denied boarding and Frontier will provide transportation on a Frontier flight to the same destination. After a passenger’s boarding pass is collected or scanned and accepted by the gate agent, and the passenger has boarded, a passenger may be removed from a flight only for safety or security reasons or in accordance with Section 3 of this Contract of Carriage.
They must also compensate you. If being denied boarding delays you for 1-2 hours you get 2x the cost of the fare up to $1550 and 2+ hours 4x up to $2150.
And they still have to put you on a plane:
>A passenger denied boarding, voluntarily or involuntarily, pursuant to this section, will be transported on Frontier’s next available flight on which space is available and at no additional charge.
https://www.flyfrontier.com/legal/contract-of-carriage
Contracts of carriage are pretty much boilerplate but all of this is to say: if you pay, show up on time, and aren't denied boarding for a safety reason airlines are obligated to transport you to your destination.
(in the US)
It's true that airlines wield pricing power but their Contract of Carriage, buried under more fine print than a payday loan agreement, does impose obligations. Rule 21 of United's Contract explicitly allows refusal of transport, but Rule 4 confirms that a ticket with a confirmed reservation constitutes a binding agreement to provide service, absent violations by the passenger (like failing to check in). Rule 25 further mandates denied boarding compensation when overselling occurs, because even in brutal airline economics, a confirmed reservation isn't merely a suggestion, it's a contractual commitment, however creatively airlines may interpret "commitment." Of course, involuntary bumping, force majeure, and the ever-convenient "operational decisions" let airlines off the hook. But to claim they have no obligations is not true.
Otherwise can’t one just rent the room as a solo guest, and just have someone come through later, as long as there isn’t an obvious group activity going on inside the room?
This is not always the case. A two-bedroom hotel suite on average costs more than two standard rooms. This happens because the vast majority of rooms are twin/double and cheap hotels often don't offer suites at all.
At a given location two travellers would be chosing from e.g 100 options and at least some of these would be budget/discount offerings. In the same location a family of four would have to chose from 10 options and likely none of them are budget/discount.
Now consider that you HAVE to travel during the school holidays so competition for these damn 10 options increases and the price for both hotels and tickets easily goes up 2-3x.
There are some situations where a family of four would get a better price per person but most of the time it's the other way round.
Frozen > 5kg or so?
You can always stay in Motel 6 for $20/night.
I'm pitching the movie to the Hallmark channel right now.
It comes out of the family budget either way.
The cost for the hotel and Airbnb doesn't really change a lot, if there is more than one person staying in the room. More or less another set of towels and a bit more soap. Even providing rooms with single beds only brings down the costs marginally.
Travelling with somebody else brings costs down. Hotel rooms have the same surface for single and double occupancy (in fact they are usually the same rooms!). Even if you remove the surface of one single bed, the room stays almost the same. So, it’s much cheaper for 2.
I’ve regularly seen larger cars with more capacity equal to medium sedans.
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1. I don't want to stay in a hostel. See below for more on this; but, hostels, at least the ones I have researched, have bunk rooms and shared facilities. Hard pass for me.
2. I don't like sharing a bedroom and, especially, a bathroom in someone's home when they may be there. There's simply a different level of security (potentially false, I understand) in a hotel vs a rented room in a house.
"Hostel" may mean different things in different parts of the world. When I was growing up, I heard about "youth hostels" that were mostly in Europe and mostly providing inexpensive accommodations to college-age people who were backpacking through the continent or had a Eurail Pass for traveling, etc. But I have never stayed in one.
When I surveyed a few hostels in Hollywood, it seemed that they were indeed targeting college-age people. Furthermore, they were cultivating a "package deal" atmosphere where there were day trips and coffee hours and programmed activities, for residents to do while they were there. And with limited privacy and shared facilities, there could be bustling activity and interruptions of sleep all night long. They did not seem like places to check in, crash overnight and leave in the morning. And that is probably calculated to appeal to the clientele who are not homeless and did not simply save up $40 by panhandling during the past week.
DINK > Solo >> anything else
> A flat fare would bring solo prices down and group rates up so the blended average is the same
So... it is penalizing solo travelers?
You can also get screwed in the other direction where groups are more expensive - airlines will sometimes bump every ticket in a group to a higher fare level even if they still list one or two tickets at a cheaper price for smaller groups.
But for the benefit of this debate I'll state my bias. Almost all my travel is as a group.
But in most other facets of life, we save by buying more, right? (buying wholesale, buying bulk, etc).
So I've actually had the other feeling... if I'm buying 4 tickets at once, can I get a bit of a volume discount? And I'm not sure that's what the airlines are doing here (I don't ascribe any altruism, it's probably more that families were getting cold feet with increasing prices), but I like that I get some kind of cheaper rate when I'm buying 4x of something, just like in just about every other purchase in life.
One way or another, this increases profit for them.
So it’s still penalizing being single. Single travelers are subsidizing group rates. They are being penalized for not buying multiple. You didn’t explain how it’s not a penalty to buy as one person
A solo traveler can decide to take a trip because they saw a good fare very trivially: you're not going on a trip with 2 days notice just because a fare "tipped the scale" when you need 10x the planning and logistics, and the airlines know that.
They're not doing it to entice families to travel, they just know solo travel is associated with higher incomes and want to extract more money.
That said, I have to imagine the reasoning behind it having to do with assuming some large percentage of solo travelers are on work expense trips, so squeezing the company for a few more dimes. The article assumes as much -
> It's just another way for airlines to continue “segmenting” their customers, charging business travelers paying with a corporate card more while offering a better deal to families on the exact same flight.
A lot of companies I've worked for don't even do corporate cards, they just tell you to pay for it and submit for reimbursement.
All of that rabble out of the way, it feels like it would be impossible to identify business vs leisure customers up front, so it sounds like solo leisure travelers are caught in the crossfire.
Companies offer bulk discounts on basically... everything.
This is like pointing out that the Dollar Store penalizes people for buying small quantities and thus suggesting that Costco should raise prices to "make it fair".
If they were willing to sell me 5 flight coupons for a discount, that would be acceptable. There is nothing I can do as an individual to take advantage of the discount.
By your logic, Costco is also "discriminating based on marital/family status" by selling bulk at discount. Costco doesn't sell "buy 1/5 a toilet paper package, come back and get the other 4 1/5 later". They sell the whole package up front, use it or lose it.
That's how bulk discounts work.
Heck, you could say that a gallon of milk discriminates against you because you have to pay way more to buy a pint of it, and you can't "come back later for the other pints at the same price".
This is absurdism to the highest degree.
You are welcome to book flights with friends, or even organize a flight-share program and go in on flights with strangers. Bulk doesn't discriminate. I know folks who go in together on Costco bulk because they can't use it all. Make the system work for you.
1. Higher taxes and fewer deductions 2. Higher workplace performance expectations 3. Higher costs in every aspect of life 4. Fewer options eat out, expensive solo tickets at events etc.
This is just one more example in a long list of examples of how being by yourself is penalized in the society.
1. Taxes are more punishing because you're spending half your disposable income on children, and most of it probably comes from one earner. You can say "don't have children if you can't afford it" all you like, but you wouldn't be alive if nobody had children, so it's quite selfish of anyone to be anti-children.
2. For men performance expectations are the same but now you have to somehow simultaneously be at work and also pick up your children from school at 3pm. Oh and don't forget you have to somehow cover like 80 days of school holidays a year. For women... well you can legislate that being off work for 2 years doesn't matter all you want; in reality it is a major disruption to careers.
3. Childcare is far more expensive than any increased cost I experienced for being single, with the possible exception of not being able to share rent with a partner. But once you have children... rent for a family is more than double rent for a one bed flat.
4. Yeah price me up a skiing holiday for a family of 4. Now do it for a single person (and double it if you like).
The very reason that discounted family tickets exist is that families wouldn't buy any tickets otherwise because they would be too expensive. It's the same reason student discounts exist. It's called price discrimination.
I do agree it's pretty annoying and feels unfair though. The optimum group from a price point of view is really a couple, not a family.
It gets into philosophical territory, but the default "having a pulse = good" thinking is pretty shortsighted IMO. Life is inherently suffering and no one got a yes/no prompt before being born.
Obviously ideas like yours are ingrained into us at a biological level and it logically makes sense if we want to survive as a species... but there is no inherent reason other than "just because" right?
Also... it's not society, it's the human species.
It's a strange thing of nature and evolution that it creates a species that can plan and execute its own intentional suicide.
It is amazing how blatantly people will just admit "I agree with politics that benefit me even if they exclude others."
> Taxes are more punishing because you're spending half your disposable income on children
I probably spend on my dogs what you do on your children. Gosh life sure is hard because of my decisions. Where are my discounts and tax refunds?
> It's called price discrimination.
...and when is discrimination ok? Lets all say it out loud.
Dogs are not people. Society does not rely on the continued existence of dogs. Do you see any governments enacting policies to make people have more dogs?
> when is discrimination ok?
When it makes things more moral/fair. Do you object to student discounts? Progressive taxes? You seem to be having a knee-jerk reaction to the word "discrimination". It's also called "price differentiation". Maybe that sounds less bad to you?
I guess it's all relative, lower taxes for A compared to B looks like higher taxes for B compared to A, but I suspect most of this comes from a) incentivizing people to form as many families w/ children as possible and then b) since there are so many families w/ children, people build businesses that assume most people will be in families.
I still think of it as incentivizing in the same way the EV rebate helped encourage me to buy my first EV, even if the cost of the car still was more than I would have been willing to pay for an ICE car. It made a difficult thing (slightly) less difficult.
To get on the ladder today, 5 years sharing rent is priceless. Then once you do, you get child benefits. Many people are single late in life too. So I don't think it's something you can equate.
If someone were to buy 3 tickets, it could just as easily leave an orphaned seat.
When a 25-year-old lands a senior role in 10 years at 35, it's because someone else's 13-year-old grew up, graduated college, and got hired as a junior. Promotions are 10% Crushing It, 90% dumping your grunt work on some poor sap too young to know better.
Society is a pyramid scheme, and, like all pyramid schemes, bringing more people in is ultimately more valuable than actually selling the LuLaRoe or whatever.
Obviously that's a pure economic thing you can't get mad at as tables are designed for 2+ and you're trying to get in during a high traffic time.
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...except for the average $300,000 cost of raising a child in the US. That one would seem to rather balance out all those others.
...is of course great when you personally are on the side benefitting.
That’s definitely a cherry picked example for the article, not the common scenario.
This is probably only on unpopular routes where they know they aren't going to fill the plane.
(By the way, if it's about inflating prices for individual, then it's not really volume discounting... it just appears this way on the outside)
When you fly, you usually have a choice between lots of airlines. So there's nothing "public utility" about it whatsoever.
Airports, on the other hand, are considered public infrastructure. There are also sometimes routes that are only served by one airline, which are sometimes regulated accordingly. But that isn't the general case, nor should it be.