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How to Beat High Airfares

nytimes.com

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Re: How to Beat High Airfares

#51

Post by ars »

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

What's not ethical about it? No one is forcing you to buy.

But it's probably not good business, since people get irritated by things like that and shop less.

Re: How to Beat High Airfares

#52

Post by strooltz »

I just tried the following route - EWR->DES->SFO on 6/10 and returning on 6/18 via the same route back. The price each way was ~$420 (which included 2 layovers).

I priced out EWR->SFO and United/Continental had a direct flight for $369. Maybe I'm the aberration but I think NYT should have done a few more case studies before publishing their results.

Re: How to Beat High Airfares

#53

Post by prostoalex »

hugh3 wrote: post #2

Sigh. Is there any reliable way to read nytimes articles without having an account, nowadays? I know you can usually do it by googling for a string of text from the article body, but without an extract from the article body there's no way to do that from here. And I'm assuming bugmenot no longer works in the post-paywall world, right? edit: Never mind, I found it by googling "how to beat high airfares" (which I thoug…

Pulling their RSS feeds to iGoogle seems to work, as they seem to be okay with referrer coming from www.google.com.

Re: How to Beat High Airfares

#54

Post by RyanGWU82 »

strooltz wrote: post #52

I just tried the following route - EWR->DES->SFO on 6/10 and returning on 6/18 via the same route back. The price each way was ~$420 (which included 2 layovers). I priced out EWR->SFO and United/Continental had a direct flight for $369. Maybe I'm the aberration but I think NYT should have done a few more case studies before publishing their results.

I think you got it backwards. The trick works when you're ending your trip in a hub -- you take the first leg, but skip the connection.

So, for example, say you're trying to fly to Chicago (ORD). The article's point is that it may be cheaper to buy an EWR-ORD-STL ticket, because there's actually more price competition when flying to St. Louis.

Re: How to Beat High Airfares

#55

Post by travelemployee »

I worked for airlines and one of the big 3 for many years. They have complex algorithms that try to determine the lowest price. They're competitive, and want to be the cheapest they can. They're not trying to "hide" any prices.

Doing what the author says will get you banned from the airline. If you don't fly the itinerary listed, they will tear it up in front of your face as it's in the terms and conditions.

My point: there's no real secret - the sites like Kayak and any ITA-based search product are pretty much doing so many creative things to minimize the price that it's rare to find an exception without cheating.

Finally, the pricing is crazy, but being in the tornado there's a method to the madness.

Re: How to Beat High Airfares

#56

Post by rexreed »

whakojacko wrote: post #31
ora600 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is my understanding that airlines going bankrupt again and again is a direct result of their relationship with their pilot unions: http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

That, $100/barrel oil, and a mediocre economy.

The airline industry has long been a money-loser, price of oil and state of economy not withstanding.

Re: How to Beat High Airfares

#57

Post by kirubakaran »

hugh3 wrote: post #41
aboodman wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pla…

"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."

Lets consider a few hypothetical scenarios:

1. You can get 50 dollars but it may potentially result in 60 minutes of delay for 100 people. Would you turn it down?

2. You can get 1000 dollars but it may potentially result in 5 minutes of delay for 100 people. Would you turn it down?

3. You can get 10,000 dollars but it can potentially result in 5 minutes of delay for 100 people. Would you turn it down?

4. You can get 100 Million dollars but it can potentially result in 3 minutes of delay for 100 people. Would you turn it down?

5. What if you are broke and have a child to support?

Re: How to Beat High Airfares

#58

Post by euroclydon »

hugh3 wrote: post #36
euroclydon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the unattended bag part is a big deal. Who would check a bag to some city they're never going to?

Who would check a bag to some city they're never going to? A person who wants to blow up an airliner. That's the point.

No, that a point, but not the point here. In this case it's irrelevant, because anyone pulling this maneuver would not check their bag.

Re: How to Beat High Airfares

#59

Post by rexreed »

MatthewB wrote: post #13

How to beat high airfares...drive.

At $4 a gallon, I might even challenge that. I recently calculated the cost of driving from DC to Boston, which is regularly a $240 or so ROUNDTRIP on many airlines.

It takes 2 tanks of gas each way (about a 350 mile trip, 20 miles per gallon, 15 gallons per tank). The gas cost alone is close to $240. Even if you managed to burn 3 tanks instead of 4 during the trip, you're talking 45 gallons @ $4 a gallon, which is $180... and that's just gas.

The tolls are around $20 each way. So, now you're up to $220. And what about food? Add another $20 or so. More maybe.

So, now it costs the same to drive as it does to fly. And that's not even factoring in the cost of your TIME. It takes about 7 hours to drive from DC to Boston. It takes just over 1 hour by plane. Even factoring in the airport wait and transport, you're doing better... and you can do stuff while the plane flies while you can't do anything while you're driving. And then there's traffic. And the wear and tear on your vehicle.

And this is for a relatively short trip.

So, is driving really economically better? I did the math. I did the trip. It often doesn't make sense. Do the math yourself. Only for short trips does driving beat the cost of flying, and in which case, why you would be flying anyways? On the east coast, I just take the train or a bus. $20 gets you from DC to New York. Another $15 gets you to Boston. You can't beat THAT.

So, the cost of gas has completely changed the economics and argument of drive vs. fly. Flying is almost always going to be cheaper, if you can book your flight early enough to get the discounted fares.

Re: How to Beat High Airfares

#60

Post by ghshephard »

_delirium wrote: post #44
ghshephard wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In the 15 years I've been flying actively, i've only once been on a plane where I was told to return to my seat so they could do a count. I'm presuming that was a situation where someone hopped off mid travel. So, this is really a rare scenario. I think most people who do this are savvy, which means they realize they are about to screw an entire planeload of people - so it's a fairly rare endeavor.

The fact that the NYT was consulting with Trial Lawyers as to the legality of this, is some indication of how sketchy this behavior is.

BTW - all of this thread applies to layovers where the plane lands, and some people deplane, while others stay in their seats.

None of this applies to the situation where you have to get onto another plane, or, as I've had happen to me a couple times, they require you to exit the plane and then get back on. Particularly if you didn't check luggage. I'm fine with people playing that game - usually only causes a minute or two delay, if that.

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