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I 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 li
by pshc 4y ago
I 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.