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How to Beat High Airfares

nytimes.com

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Re: How to Beat High Airfares

#41

Post by hugh3 »

aboodman wrote: post #38
sliverstorm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares about delaying an entire plane of busy people when you can save $20? [/bitter]

The article has an example of saving $189 (about 50% of the published price of the ticket in question), and a post in this thread had an example of saving 500 euro on a transatlantic flight. So it's not always trivial amount of money.

How many man-minutes of inconvenience are you willing to create for random strangers for every dollar you can save for yourself?

Come to think of it, this question is about as close to an objective measure of an individual's level of morality as we can get. Screw all theories of moral relativism; I can tell whether you're a good person or not by knowing how much money it would take to tempt you to leave an entire planeload of people sitting on the tarmac for an extra ten minutes.

Re: How to Beat High Airfares

#42

Post by donohoe »

OstiaAntica wrote: post #5

This is unethical, basically he calls for jumping off of flights at layovers, which violates the terms of the ticket. There's even a security issue for the airlines, because they need to check if your bags are flying unaccompanied. Ironic that the NYT cracks down on people evading its paywall but is selling content on doing the same for air travel.

  Ironic that the NYT cracks down on people evading its paywall but is selling content on doing the same for air travel.
{citation needed}

The NYT has done no such thing. They have gone after people for trademark violation. Big diffence :)

Re: How to Beat High Airfares

#43

Post by mthoms »

For Canadians you can add government fees, regulations and lesser competition to the reasons this occurs.

I once bought a ticket from Vancouver to London (UK) on Air Canada. Turns out I could have saved over $200 by flying via the same airline out of Seattle and connecting back in Vancouver to the exact same flight going on to London. Absurd.

Re: How to Beat High Airfares

#44

Post by _delirium »

ghshephard wrote: post #37
rhizome wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are ethics and morality being discussed in the context of business? They have their pricing strategy, I have mine. It's my travel money, let me do what I want.

Nobody who is commenting here cares (or I strongly suspect they don't care) about the Airlines and people making money. It's the hundred or so people who are sitting on the airplane that are being inconvenienced - possibly missing their own connections later on, that our concerns are for. In general, airlines don't like to have people's checked luggage travel separately from them - and they don't know if the missing…

I agree that's one concern, but it's not entirely clear to me what the division of responsibility for those waiting-around passengers is. You might blame the passengers causing the problem, but as a passenger I also expect the airline to anticipate and work around any frequent sources of disruption. If it's something that happens often enough to actually be a problem, then it's an operational problem and they should find some way to mitigate it. For example, they could include it as a factor when evaluating pricing strategies (the likely operations-disrupting effect of certain pricing strategies), or perhaps they could handle check-in and luggage-tracking differently, or they could police their fare rules more stringently to more strongly discourage it.

But they should do something, if indeed it is a problem (I'm not sure it actually is). Creating an obvious arbitrage opportunity and then structuring your operations in a way that isn't robust to some proportion of people exploiting it wouldn't be a very responsible way to run a business.

Re: How to Beat High Airfares

#45

Post by kelnos »

hugh3 wrote: post #32
bradly wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense, but you could argue that there is a cost associated with upsetting and frustrating your customers that maybe the airlines aren't taking into consideration. Something can't be right with their models if they are going bankrupt again and again.

Would you prefer that they raised the prices of the Montreal to Paris trip so that you can pay more? Or do you want them to lower the price of the Newark to Paris trip so that it sells out early and people who would have been willing to pay $1400 for that trip can't get to where they want to go?

False dichotomy. If there are really that many people who want to fly EWR->CDG, but don't due to cost considerations, the airlines will add more flights to fill extra demand caused by lower prices.

Re: How to Beat High Airfares

#46

Post by wnoise »

hugh3 wrote: post #35
sliverstorm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares about delaying an entire plane of busy people when you can save $20? [/bitter]

Sadly this is the attitude that some people really have. And if challenged on it, they'll rationalize it by blaming the airline for setting their prices that way. It's much like the drug user's rationalization of the fact that the money he spends goes to support organized crime. "Well," he says, "that's the government's fault for not legalizing the drugs I wish to take!"

In both cases they are right too: the people creating the messed-up market (government via drug laws) and (airlines via schedules) are creating incentives that have built-in externalities.

Re: How to Beat High Airfares

#47

Post by rhizome »

ghshephard wrote: post #37
rhizome wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are ethics and morality being discussed in the context of business? They have their pricing strategy, I have mine. It's my travel money, let me do what I want.

Nobody who is commenting here cares (or I strongly suspect they don't care) about the Airlines and people making money. It's the hundred or so people who are sitting on the airplane that are being inconvenienced - possibly missing their own connections later on, that our concerns are for. In general, airlines don't like to have people's checked luggage travel separately from them - and they don't know if the missing…

Then it's a failure of the pricing strategy, developed by the airline itself, if it encourages people to make a rational choice that delays or affects other passengers.

Re: How to Beat High Airfares

#48

Post by alienfluid »

georgieporgie wrote: post #4

Book your itinerary as a set of two one-way flights, rather than as a round trip. Every time I have looked, a single one-way is more expensive than a round-trip between the same locations. Maybe I've just been 'lucky'. Edit: no, I'm just ignorant. Turns out domestic one-ways are more proportionally priced versus round-trips.

If your name is even remotely "exotic" (and mine seems to be), good luck checking in online - apparently one way tickets trigger some alarm in the depths of DHS.

Re: How to Beat High Airfares

#49

Post by qq66 »

mthoms wrote: post #39
whakojacko wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not that crazy when you look into it more. Montreal to Paris is a low yielding route filled mostly with price-conscious tourists. New York to Paris has, as a percentage, substantially more business travel, which can sustain higher fares. For each route, the airline (presumably Continental) is trying to extract what it sees as the maximum price the market is willing to bear. As another example, Des Moines to Dalla…

Based on the principle of charging the maximum price the market is willing to bear , would you consider it ethical for a company like Amazon to charge more or less based on the affluence of the billing zipcode for each customer? /honest question

I think it would be ethical, although bad business. Both price discrimination methods, by the way, are defeatable. You can drive an extra few hours to another airport (have done this many times), and you can get your packages shipped to another address.

Re: How to Beat High Airfares

#50

Post by guelo »

OstiaAntica wrote: post #5

This is unethical, basically he calls for jumping off of flights at layovers, which violates the terms of the ticket. There's even a security issue for the airlines, because they need to check if your bags are flying unaccompanied. Ironic that the NYT cracks down on people evading its paywall but is selling content on doing the same for air travel.

I'm trying to comprehend how it is unethical to game a system that is constantly gaming its customers.
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