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> Do you have any problem buying airline tickets now? Do airlines have any problem selling them to you? Of course not; this process is already efficient and opt
by pshc 4y ago
> Do you have any problem buying airline tickets now? Do airlines have any problem selling them to you? Of course not; this process is already efficient and optimal.
I don’t know about optimal, there are middlemen everywhere.
- jakelazaroff 4y agoWhere are the middlemen? I buy most tickets directly from the airline website.
- seltzered_ 4y agoSome of the middlemen disappeared. Remember hipmunk? Remember how searching for flights would show airlines that shared data but not all (e.g. Southwest)?
- woodruffw 4y agoWhat middleman do you deal with when buying an airline ticket? I buy mine directly from the airline; when I search, the search engines I use directly link me to the airline for the sale. Airline ticketing itself is suboptimal for historic reasons (complicated fare class coding), but middlemen are no longer a major factor in that. Travel agents no longer dominate booking.
- pshc 4y agoI typically don’t deal with the middlemen directly either (though most people use Booking or Expedia) but they’re underneath it all. Referral fees for search links, payment processors, the ticketing system, security fee, airport improvement fee (which is fine and good), customs fee, immigration fee, animal and plant inspection service, all of these take their cut on the way, and then surveillance ad tech companies mine and sell the data. And then there’s overbooking. Some of these are necessary middlemen but I would hardly call this optimal.
- woodruffw 4y agoNot all of those are middlemen: some are just constituent services you're paying for (the plant maintenance and immigration fees, for example). Even the payment processor (which really is a middleman) is likely not a source of suboptimal pricing in airline ticketing: the current alternative is cash transactions, which would probably cost the airlines and airports (and us) significantly more in terms of safely moving the money around. Maybe FedNow will improve that.
- qeternity 4y agoMiddlemen are not always bad. Would you like to have to deal with 50 different suppliers for the basic foodstuffs you might keep in your home? No, you'd much rather go to a disgusting middleman (i.e. grocery store) and buy all 50 of those items from one vendor. Where middlemen exist in travel these days, it's mostly this. I personally don't want to have to search dozens are individual airline websites for fares.
- coldtea 4y agoYou can buy almost any air ticket from the airline website. The only reason to get to a middleman is so that you have a bigger variety of options to chose from, as they can sell from multiple airlines (and also bear some costs and buy in bulk in advance from the airline and sell cheaper).