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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 pricin

• postalrat 1y ago
  Are these discounts compared to prices before the change or did they raise the price for individual travelers?
  • SonOfLilit 1y ago
    Are grocery store discounts for six packs compared to prices before the change or did they raise the price of single items? Here they don't even advertise it as a discount, so there's no ethical problem with raising the individual traveler price by x and lowering the family price by y so that the total profit remains the same.
    • MentatOnMelange 1y ago
      There is absolutely an ethical problem with charging people different prices for the same exact product/service
      • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > There is absolutely an ethical problem with charging people different prices for the same exact product/service One, there isn’t. One party undercutting another for the same product is how competition generates consumer surplus. Two, it isn’t the same product. When I fly with my family, we check in together. We board together. I collect their docs on my phone and double check they have them on theirs. I turn down upgrades so I can sit with them. If there is a change, it takes one customer service agent maybe 10% longer to adjust everyone in bulk. I’m not incurring 4 or 5x the cost on the airline for 4 to 5x the revenue, this is why bulk discounting exists for everything. This isn’t an ethical problem. If it’s triggering an ethical system, that’s more damning for the system than for Delta. This is a communication and brand problem.
        • fireflash38 1y ago
          Mm, it feels unfair. I was trying to reason through why I think it's an ethical problem and that's what I've come up with. You're not treating people equally - whether it's in person bartering where you make assumptions about them based on snap judgements or via airlines seen here. There's an even bigger fairness issue when there's such a huge data knowledge gap between the parties, both knowing that there is this hidden price structure as well as knowing a ton about you. So there's privacy implications too. Edit: it's not undercutting. It's price discrimination. You know the thing people fucking hate when trying to buy a car. Half the reason people liked buying Tesla is cause the price is the price is the price.
          • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
            > 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 it comes time to pay for it, to almost all of the flying public.
            • valleyer 1y ago
              > 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 experience, but no one offers it.
              • ghaff 1y ago
                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.
  • krick 1y ago
    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 contracts with agencies, etc, they'd have to charge so much for a seat that you wouldn't pay and all this travel industry you are accustomed to simply wouldn't exist. The whole business is built on making somebody who crucially needs to fly pay as much, as he can, and then to make price attractive enough for the rest of us so that you can sell the rest of the tickets, so that flight can make any profit. And in the end, margins are super thin in this business. Also, your question implies that you imagine that there is some simple enough "true price for a seat", which is so far from the truth, you have no idea. If you actually look at the price breakdown for a given ticket, there are literally dozens of components in it. It's not unusual that so called "fare" of a ticket (which is, like, "just price") may be literally $1, and the rest of $300 is various taxes, surcharges and payoffs I won't even try to start to explain here. I mean, really, people here truly have no idea what they are complaining about. Airline pricing is not a thing you should hate.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • alborzb 1y ago
      >> 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.
• listenallyall 1y ago
  All airline pricing is unadvertised and not communicated. They also sell through lots of independent agencies and channels. It would be weird to specifically advertise this. Unlike say, buying a second pair of shoes - not many people will buy an extra plane ticket to save 30% off both.
  • jermaustin1 1y ago
    > not many people will buy an extra plane ticket to save 30% off both. That was kind of the premise of a movie I watched last night where a couples retreat offered a group discount for 4 couples or something. So I could see it being "Bring your friends for 30% off!" being a cool summer promotion to beach destinations or something.
  • fiddlerwoaroof 1y ago
    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 something like airfares, the business is still doing its half of negotiations: collecting bits of data about the buyer to determine a price; but, crucially, there’s no real way for the buyer to “talk back” and so the process seems arbitrary.
    • gruez 1y ago
      >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 really. The "negotiation" is still there. Time limited discounts weed out consumers who need something immediately. Coupons weed out people who aren't willing to put the legwork to find them. Loyalty programs and app-based offers (eg. McDonalds) take all of this to the next level by sending targeted coupons based on whatever demographic/behavioral information they can glean from you.
• delfinom 1y ago
  It's intentional and working as designed. The same way they have been observed to offer higher prices to iPhone users at times They come up with schemes to rake in money based on market segmentation they run numbers on and have their booking systems setup in a way to make price comparison "difficult" for a normal user.
• BurningFrog 1y ago
  As I understand it, prices are generated by algorithms on the spot, and may change any number of times during a day. You can't advertise prices that constantly change.
• arp242 1y ago
  I once tried to book a flight with the same-day return; the price for the return flight was mad expensive. The same return flight was a few hundred euros cheaper if you booked the initial flight a day earlier. My theory is that most same-day travel is for business, and businesses are far less price-sensitive than consumers and will just pay whatever. I suspect this is what's going on here. Most solo travellers are for business, not consumers for holidays. The price difference here is huge – almost half – which is far beyond a bulk discount, we're talking about 1 person vs 2 people. That's also why none of this is advertised: it's not a discount, but a "we think you can pay more, so we'll charge you more" type of thing. Is that a good/bad/ethical/predatory thing? I don't know. Leaves kind of a bad taste for me though.
  • nradov 1y ago
    At times it has also been common for airlines to charge lower prices for round trip tickets that extend over a Saturday. The thinking being that business travelers usually return home on Thursday or Friday and they're less price sensitive so airlines could use that as a way to discriminate. Leisure travelers typically stayed through a weekend and received lower prices.
    • ghaff 1y ago
      My anecdotal experience is that this sort of discount doesn't really exist any longer. At least it isn't obvious to me when I book for the most part. Saturday night stay discounts for flights used to be very pronounced.
  • bdcravens 1y ago
    Some companies more or less do the same thing with their "enterprise" software.
  • FabHK 1y ago
    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 producers "grab" some of that consumer surplus for themselves (as "price" is not a horizontal line anymore, but gets closer to the demand line). So this is bad for consumers, good for producers. However, the producers can use the surplus to subsidize products for poorer consumers, so that a higher quantity of goods is sold. Having said that, the airline market is very weird (oligopoly character, very perishable goods, ...)
• yosito 1y ago
  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 some sort of private browsing, but even doing that affects the price that you're offered.
  • ListeningPie 1y ago
    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.
    • mr_toad 1y ago
      > Pricing based on individuals sounds illegal. It happens in every car dealership. And in enterprise sales. And in some countries in nearly every market and store.
    • account42 1y ago
      It's definitely the case that a round trip going from A to B to A can have a very different price than a round trip going from B to A to B using the same routes.
• andrei_says_ 1y ago
  The shadiness and manipulation, and extraction at every step, while monetizing or cutting every possible part of the experience and aggressively underpaying every employee. This list of practices may sound like “shitting” on the companies but is just that - a list of their normalized practices.
• sagarkamat 1y ago
  This is the wrong comparison though. Merchants offer bulk discount to incentivize customers to buy more units of whatever they’re selling. I can’t buy more than one seat on the plane of its just me traveling. I can’t utilize the ‘bulk discount’ if I’m not traveling with anyone
  • account42 1y ago
    Group discounts are pretty common for all kinds of services, they are pretty comparable to bulk discounts for goods. You might not use two seats on your own but you might bring along a friend.