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Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

thriftytraveler.com

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Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#331

Post by magicalhippo »

geverett wrote: post #33

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 s…

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?

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#332

Post by phil21 »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #178

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 populatio…

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.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#333

Post by al_borland »

ttoinou wrote: post #213
al_borland wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I "used" Scott Cheap Flights in 2018 for a few years and never found a good deal

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.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#334

Post by BurningFrog »

p1necone wrote: post #269

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 advertis…

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.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#335

Post by arp242 »

p1necone wrote: post #269

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 advertis…

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.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#336

Post by ghaff »

kimos wrote: post #254
yadaeno wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

The richest pay for the best cards and presumably buy enough appropriate goods to make the best cards worthwhile.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#337

Post by ghaff »

_heimdall wrote: post #228
NegativeLatency wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially when your industry is so "critical" that it has repeatedly received bailouts from the government.

Are you referring to bailouts for airline operators or Boeing?

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.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#338

Post by Aurornis »

n8cpdx wrote: post #20
Aurornis wrote: post #2

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 everyo…

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?

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.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#339

Post by ghaff »

ceejayoz wrote: post #307
fallingknife wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airline ticket prices are flat since 2000, which is down almost 50% after inflation. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SETG01 . So I say let them keep doing what they're doing.

Is that accounting for things like bag fees and “fuel surcharges” that used to be in the ticket price?

People who fly any amount don't pay for checked bags if they check anything at all.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#340

Post by alaxhn »

twoodfin wrote: post #306
stmw wrote: post #194

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.

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.

> 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.

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