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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

#431

Post by ghaff »

gruez wrote: post #393
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

>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 r…

Yeah, but it's not routine. I don't go into Walmart and quibble unlike some Middle Eastern bazaar. I probably do some negotiation at the car dealer (which, incidentally, many people on this board probably hate or with a job offer--ditto). And coupon stuff is mostly pretty low dollar; the grocery store flyers I get go in the trash.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#432

Post by ghaff »

amrocha wrote: post #396
fn-mote wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 po…

The incentive is right in the term loyalty points. Tending to stick with one airline, if you travel a lot, has all sorts of status and rewards incentives. Which you can augment with things like branded credit cards, etc.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#433

Post by ghaff »

arcticbull wrote: post #389
margalabargala wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cli…

> 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 purc…

For most purposes, a free 2% cash back card is probably optimum. I have another relatively low fee card for various reasons. If I still traveled enough to justify an airline club card (as I used to), I might have that.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#434

Post by ghaff »

devilbunny wrote: post #407
singleshot_ wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: b…

A former co-worker who lived in Singapore at the time told me that that the deal with Singapore Airlines "flight attendants" was you got the job after college and then got married and left.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#435

Post by ghaff »

valleyer wrote: post #423
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. Perhaps that's because all the U.S. airlines have engaged in such a race to the bottom on quality that there's no other distinguishing factor. I'd happily pay more for a more pleasant experi…

They do. But it's a big premium. Which I might pay for especially long haul international but I probably won't for a domestic flight.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#436

Post by wqaatwt »

Uehreka wrote: post #402
FabHK wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not so much “subsidizing” as maximizing revenue by charging as much as each individual consumer is willing to pay instead of a flat price. Albeit the outcome is very similar.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#437

Post by alborzb »

krick wrote: post #386
postalrat wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these discounts compared to prices before the change or did they raise the price for individual travelers?

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 cont…

>> In all honesty all this thread is people complaining about something they don't have a clue about.

Considering that I saw the same uproar on 4 major travel blogs: Thrifty Traveller (who originally reported this), One Mile at a time, Enilria and View from the Wing.

I'd hardly call it people complaining about something they don't have a clue about.

This pricing practice of charging more for solo travellers is new, deceptive and even travel bloggers who are thought leaders are upset by this.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#438

Post by amrocha »

ghaff wrote: post #432
amrocha wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 po…

The incentive is right in the term loyalty points. Tending to stick with one airline, if you travel a lot, has all sorts of status and rewards incentives. Which you can augment with things like branded credit cards, etc.

Sure, if you value those things then by all means, but it’s strictly speaking a poor financial decision

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#439

Post by ListeningPie »

yosito wrote: post #384
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…

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 s…

I've also heard that depending on what country you're buying from the price changes, but using VPN I've never been able to replicate the results. Pricing based on individuals sounds illegal.

Re: Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

#440

Post by mattgreenrocks »

sgerenser wrote: post #392
kristjansson wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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).

Yep, that’s who we use. It is half the cost of VZW’s cheapest plan with more data and better QCI. The latter aspect turns out mattering a lot more than I thought.
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