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The airlines are awfully upset with the US law that forces them to show the full cost of the flight. They really want to show that they're the cheapest airline
by monksy 10y ago
The airlines are awfully upset with the US law that forces them to show the full cost of the flight. They really want to show that they're the cheapest airline without being the cheapest.
A few things they've done:
1. They've created baggage fees for checking bags: That accounts for +$50
2. The YQ/Fuel charge: You're subject on their pricing of fuel
3. Seat Charges: If you want to reserve a seat before checking, some airlines charge for this (Namely AA)
4. Fees for printing a BP (Ryan Air), checking in at the airport (Ryan Air again), Carry on luggage (Spirit), etc
5. Charging for alcohol on long haul flights (I'm rather fine with it.. but it used to be customary)
6. Charging for food on long haul flights. (I'm looking at you US Airways CLT-AUR)
- ethagknight 10y agoBut many, if not most, of those things are things I would prefer to not pay for, and I would prefer that my seat on a given flight not subsidize the overpacking drunken Luddite who hits all those items in one swoop. The cost for an airline to serve me vs serving that high needs customer is very different, why should I pay for the extra service without seeing the benefit?
- bbcbasic 10y agoOnce they have sold you the ticket though they are free to extort you e.g. on meals. Sure you could BYO for the 14 hr flight but ... yuk!
- mikeash 10y agoI've not seen such a long flight where meals are paid. Once you reach that timescale, food becomes non-optional. I have had 14 hour flights where the food was so bad that it wasn't even worth getting it for free, so it can still go wrong that way.
- ohwello 10y agoNorwegian Air does not serve free food on transcontinental flights. Fine by me, I'm comfortable surviving 12 hours without eating hot food, in fact I do it almost every day.
- arghimonmobile 10y agoMelbourne to Singapore recently was 7+h with no included food, only dubious snacks Easyjet-style. And in contradiction to another comment here, the email confirming my booking explicitly stated that no outside food and drink was allowed on-board. It's anyone's guess how,well that's enforced, but on first evaluation, if that's not extortion, I don't know what is.
- mikeash 10y agoSeven hours with no included food would be OK in my view. I'd start to draw the line around 10 hours. Really, as long as they're up-front about it (both the fact that there's no free food, and what they sell and the prices), I'd be OK regardless. However, banning outside food and drink is ridiculous. I'd get right on ignoring that, and if they were somehow able to enforce it, I'd stop traveling with them.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- monksy 10y agoThe 5 hour flight of Charlotte to Aurba (US Airways) was a pay for lunch deal. Shame for an international flight.
- jeffwilcox 10y agoMany airlines do not consider Central America or Caribbean to be actual international flights from North America. You can usually tell in whether they offer a true business class cabin or just a first class cabin like other domestic flights. :/
- eh78ssxv2f 10y agoI do not understand this. Do other means of transport provide free food? I have traveled cross-country in Greyhound. Never got free food. What is that about airline travel that people want cheap, and still want luxury?
- diogenescynic 10y agoGreyhounds usually at least stop for food. Airplanes cannot.
- hyperbovine 10y agoGreyhound takes 8 hours to go from LA to San Francisco. What choice do they have?
- maneesh 10y agoI've been on 13-hour transatlantic flights. They've never once stopped so I could get lunch.
- SixSigma 10y agoThe irony is airlines included free food to get people on board.
- vertex-four 10y agoWeirdly, the low-cost long-distance bus service in the UK has an option for food, drink, more reliably available wifi and better seating at not much more in cost if you're clever about it, in the form of Megabus/Citylink Gold. Its higher-cost competitor, National Express, stops at service stations on certain routes and provides vouchers for the cafes/restaurants there. (They also often make stops at large bus stations for upwards of quarter of an hour, allowing people to get food from surrounding shops.) And at times, you can get first class on the trains at less additional cost than the wifi would cost - with comfier seating, free wifi, multiple meals, and free alcohol. I have a suspicion the issue isn't really the lack of service, it's that either you get nickle and dimed or the next step up is an order of magnitude higher in price.
- snrplfth 10y agoSo instead of bundling into your ticket price the cost of food you may not want or like, they allow people who bring their own to save money, and only charge those who consume that particular good. Apparently this is "extortion", somehow? Nonsense.
- saiya-jin 10y agoliquids are, since you cannot bring anything through security checkin. and if you don't drink a single drop on that 14h flight, well you are an exception
- snrplfth 10y agoThen buy a drink and pack your own food. In any case, it's hardly the airlines' fault that liquids can't come through security. I just do not see what is so bad about unbundling food from ticket price.
- fornever 10y agoIf everyone would start bringing their own food that would lead to a huge mess of transporting, storing, unpacking, preparing and disposing of food in all sorts of random ways at various times throughout the flight by the hundreds of hungry sleep deprived passengers. Airports would be even less efficient going through security, vendors trying to sell food to go and people congregating to buy things. There's really enough general unbundling of comfort and efficiency at airports already. I would definitely pay more if even more things was standardized and included for everyone on the flight (like luggage, security, airport seating).
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoOr, people could suck it up and not eat for an hour or two. Sure on longer flights a meal is welcome, but even missing a meal should not be a terrible burden.
- 10y ago
- obstinate 10y agoPart of me agrees. And I also think flying is really cheap, not expensive like people are saying here. On the other hand, I do want to point out a couple of things. It's crazy to charge for printing a boarding pass. That does not cost money (to a first approximation). Also, substantially all the airlines that charge to check bags will gate check for free. It's just more hassle. So what's really happening is that your seat IS being subsidized -- by the people who check bags at at checkin rather than at the gate.
- peteretep 10y agoThis is all classic price discrimination
- snrplfth 10y agoYes, but hardly anybody understands price discrimination. Generally, people think that by requiring services and their prices to be bundled, their overall price will be lower. Which is not true of course.
- lmm 10y agoI think mostly people are offended by the waste of having a very complex sales contract - understanding and negotiating terms is a lot of effort for all parties, and may well add up to a higher cost than what's saved through pricing efficiency.
- snrplfth 10y agoYes, it might do so. Depends on how expensive the services are and how easy the process is. But what annoys me is the attitude of "I prefer that Service X and Service Y be bundled together, therefore it should be mandatory that they are." Sure, there are arguments for bundling, and for unbundling. I don't see that just because some people prefer one or the other that it should be required.
- 10y ago
- earcaraxe 10y agoSure, but they were giving those to you for free and now they'll be taking them away without decreasing the price. So you're still paying the same for the base fare, it's just nobody gets the "luxuries" anymore.
- WorldMaker 10y agoIt's also funny how some of those "luxuries" were originally part of the base service to make everyone's experience better and by removing them, now everyone's experience is worse and costs more. Primarily: checked baggage exists as a system to get baggage out of the cramped main cabin and into simpler, dedicated storage with marginal and reasonably efficient load/unload times. By charging fees for any checked baggage (as opposed to excessive checked baggage as used to be the regime), the airlines incentivize a lot more people to try to cram every thing they can carry on into the main cabin. This results in slower loading/unloading times of people because all the carry ons fill the bins quite inefficiently; many peoples bags wind up in bins that aren't easy for them to access for them to unload; some peoples bags won't fit at all because there has never been enough room in the main cabin. The airlines now have to compensate for this by asking for volunteers to gate check bags for every flight, which is a waste of everyone's time involved, and still not as efficient for anyone involved as simply checking bags up front like airlines originally were planned to do and airports were planned to handle.
- massysett 10y ago"Primarily: checked baggage exists as a system to get baggage out of the cramped main cabin and into simpler, dedicated storage with marginal and reasonably efficient load/unload times. By charging fees for any checked baggage (as opposed to excessive checked baggage as used to be the regime), the airlines incentivize a lot more people to try to cram every thing they can carry on into the main cabin." So Frontier, Spirit, and now the "Basic Economy" fares charge even more for cabin bags than for checked bags. Problem solved. One theory I heard about the checked bag fees (back when carry-on bags were no extra charge) was that the fee freed up cargo space so the airline could carry more paid air cargo, purposefully pushing baggage into the main cabin.
- hillz 10y agoApart from perhaps printing a boarding pass and (given security) food on very long flights, these all seem OK to me. Not charging for checked baggage is equivalent to taxing those who pack light and subsidizing those who pack heavy (and cost more fuel).
- ryandrake 10y agoCharging for checked luggage means I'm going to bring as much luggage as I possibly can get away with into the main cabin, slowing boarding and unboarding, taking up overhead bin space, etc. What they SHOULD be charging for is carry-ons.
- dagw 10y agoAirlines have to pay the airport ground crew to load and unload checked luggage. It doesn't cost the airlines much extra to have really slow boarding and unboarding, nor does having the cabin packet to the max with carry-ons affect them much.
- saiya-jin 10y agoit can cause take-of delays, which can easily cascade and affect many flights. I presume these can easily cost cash, no?
- dagw 10y agoIt can in extreme cases, but based on totally unscientific observations, the number of flights delayed significantly because people spend too long time stowing their carry on is tiny. Even just looking a boarding related delays, I'd say people simply not showing up at the gate on time is a much bigger problem.
- rconti 10y agoThey just close the doors.
- mikeash 10y ago#2 is complete BS (fuel is an inherent part of the cost) but I have no problem with the rest. I especially don't get the outrage over baggage fees. Transporting passenger baggage costs money, both due to handling it, and due to the opportunity cost of cargo they could be carrying instead. "Free" baggage just means that light travelers subsidize people with bags. That's great if you have bags, but not great if you don't, and incentivizes inefficiency.
- ubernostrum 10y agoThe "fuel surcharge" is usually a tax dodge. British Airways, which has the most notorious surcharge in the industry, does it because the taxes only apply to the fare itself; if they split out fuel charge separately, they only get taxed on the base fare.
- mikeash 10y agoInteresting! I assume there's some requirement to at least vaguely reflect the actual cost of fuel, so they can't just charge $1 for the "fare" and put the rest as a tax-free "fuel surcharge"?
- greglindahl 10y agoThe entire point of VAT is that it takes care of situations like this one; is there something funny about VAT for fuel?
- ubernostrum 10y agoNot saying I agree, but I believe the general argument is that if tax was already paid/collected when the fuel was purchased, unbundling it from the fare price prevents it being taxed again.
- jdmichal 10y agoHow are fully-consumed process inputs handled in VAT? It's easy to calculate non-consumed inputs. They paid $x per kg of aluminum. Each finished product contains y kg. So the "cost basis" for each product is $x * y. But what happens to, say, the electricity used to melt the aluminum before being poured into molds?
- steveklabnik 10y agoI wish I could cash in on checked luggage for reduced fares; I never travel with more than a carry on, but have tons of free checked bagged due to status. The overall matrix of things that apply to a flight is annoying though.
- jon-wood 10y agoThere's an Uber for Air Freight business in that somewhere. Pair people who want cheap next day delivery on a package and people who are flying but not checking any luggage.
- Kliment 10y agoGreat idea but don't NA air transport regulations require you pack your own luggage? I certainly got asked that multiple times last time I went from Europe to NA.
- pcr0 10y agoThat's a clusterfuck of nope right there, one bad apple tries to smuggle drugs and someone innocent could end up executed.
- hx87 10y agoJust exclude countries that have harsh drug smuggling penalties from the program.
- hibikir 10y agoLast time I checked, AA didn't charge for getting a seat early: they just charge extra for all the seats that aren't all the way at the back. The last time I was stuck flying with them the plane wasn't even 1/3rd full. A few people, sitting near the front, were part of their ridiculous set of reward tiers. The rest of us? Packed in the back. After the attendants closed the doors, we got the go ahead to just move to sensible seats of the exact same size and amenities, but that they'd have wanted us to pay extra for. The airline knew the flight was empty the night before, and so did everyone that went through the check in process and sees all the empty seats they tried to upsell. Is the chance for an extra fee or two beat having the old black lady next to me look at the empty middle of the plane and ask if we were in American Airlines or in the Montgomery Plane company?
- ams6110 10y agoSeems odd also as they would normally not want all the passenger weight in the back, for center-of-gravity balance. Probably also why they encouraged people to spread out after boarding.
- rrdharan 10y agoI doubt the passenger weight matters much if it is a larger (7x7 or A3xx) plane?
- tehwebguy 10y agoCorrect, if you book a Main Cabin (coach) ticket on AA seat selection is free. The only exceptions are seats in "Main Cabin Extra" which almost always have 10%+ more legroom. These are usually the first row in coach, plus the exit rows. That said, some MCE seats (and some MC seats) can only be selected pre-checkin by AA flyers with status. AA status holders also do not pay extra for MCE seats, whether they are status reserved or not.
- simonster 10y agoThere are seats that are not "Main Cabin Extra" but that AA will still charge you for, although less than they would charge you for MCE. Once the free seats are full, your options are to pay extra, or accept what is most likely going to be a middle seat separated from anyone you're traveling with. My academic institution refuses to pay for any kind of seat upgrades, so from my perspective, the rational response is to fly on another airline. I will probably have to avoid airlines that start "offering" "Basic Economy" fares for the same reason.
- hx87 10y agoI'd be satisfied if I could just query the price of the flight by entering my preferences on a form.
- SilasX 10y agoCan't you already filter by flights that don't meet your criteria? It would be even better if you could specify an arbitrary utility function over the flight properties (total price, bags you want to bring, seat size, departure time sensitivity, etc) and have the results ranked by that function.