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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

#401

Post by sgerenser »

carlosjobim wrote: post #119
frank_nitti wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you going to bring your own sheets and breakfast as well?

I don’t know about yours, but my spouse is OK with sharing sheets with me.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#402

Post by Uehreka »

FabHK wrote: post #380
arp242 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 producer…

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.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#403

Post by os2warpman »

tredre3 wrote: post #253
os2warpman wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-sto…

If calling you a liar gets me a no-stop ticket from America to Paris for only 150 bucks, then you're a liar.

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.

https://imgur.com/Wn43raL

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#404

Post by spauldo »

anal_reactor wrote: post #267
mobilemidget wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally think it's fair if they charge by weight. The post office does it, why not airlines?

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.

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.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#405

Post by gruez »

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

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.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#406

Post by JoshTriplett »

amrocha wrote: post #399
JoshTriplett wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gene…

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.

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:

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 .

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#407

Post by devilbunny »

singleshot_ wrote: post #309
WalterBright wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airfares were much more expensive when the government regulated them.

You get what you pay for.

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.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#408

Post by jdeibele »

arcticbull wrote: post #382
arp242 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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'l…

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.

https://www.bookingninjas.com/blog/gds-system-top-reasons-wh...

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#409

Post by xp84 »

akudha wrote: post #224
mbrameld wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#410

Post by hluska »

jmward01 wrote: post #381
arp242 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

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