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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

#371

Post by amrocha »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #351
kimos wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> They also have the poorest who have cheap credit cards subsidize the richest who have the best cards and receive most of the rewards. This is false. https://x.com/patio11/status/1902555603534295115

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.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#373

Post by amrocha »

ncruces wrote: post #274
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.

> 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.

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.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#374

Post by ghaff »

owlbite wrote: post #277
carabiner wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They already are?

Mostly they don't.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#375

Post by amrocha »

ghaff wrote: post #367
ceejayoz wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People pay billions in bag fees alone every year. https://upgradedpoints.com/travel/airlines/us-airlines-highe... It’s hardly the only fee, either.

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.)

It actually literally contradicts what you said. People flying any amount (at christmas with their family) are paying bag fees.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#377

Post by ceejayoz »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #356
ceejayoz wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Bag fees are fairly small compared to the ticket price and obviously don’t make up for a 50% decrease.

> Bag fees are fairly small compared to the ticket price…

$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".

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#378

Post by schiffern »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #355
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.

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…

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.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29425650 or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#379

Post by krick »

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.

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…)

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#380

Post by FabHK »

arp242 wrote: post #335
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 fo…

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, ...)

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