I never would have understood this as a young, single person. Now that I have a family there are several times per year where we price out the cost of a solo ticket for one parent, the price of taking one or two kids, or the cost of all of us going for something. Having a quantity discount would absolutely tip the scales for us for certain trips.
People will look at this as penalizing single travelers and want everyone to have the lowest fare, but that’s not the real alternative. A flat fare would bring solo prices down and group rates up so the blended average is the same.
Traveling solo is already brutal because hotels and Airbnbs are priced on the assumption of two travelers.
Traveling solo essentially costs double automatically because of lodging, and it kind of sucks there’s a double whammy with airfare where, unlike lodging, the penalty doesn’t actually make any sense.
I guess as a family be grateful that all hotel rooms come with a 50% (or more) discount per traveler?
Only when you're comparing the cheapest vehicles of each size, where the cost of the vehicle and maintenance is probably roughly in line with vehicle size. There are plenty of luxury and sports cars widely available for rent that will cost more than a minivan.
Some countries (e.g. Japan) charge per person in non-Western hotels. Even then, you may get different prices for a solo traveler because the lower overall price means they need to increase the per person rate to make enough margin with their fixed costs.
They do this in Mexico as well. Always just seems like an honor system thing unless they are checking people at the door to the hotel and/or room each time they enter, which only seems realistic in very small hotels who have no e.g. restaurant open to the public.
Otherwise can’t one just rent the room as a solo guest, and just have someone come through later, as long as there isn’t an obvious group activity going on inside the room?
Depends on region. In many places a hotel room for two guests has two beds that are either separate or together. So make sure you book a king size bed, and also buy one of those fake moustache-and-glasses for your wife so nobody suspects anything at breakfast. Or she can wait in the room and you'll sneak some scrambled eggs and bacon from the buffet in your coat pockets for her.
I see people complaining a lot about single traveler (with their own room) surcharges on both group and self-guided trips. But, you're right, while per-person-double-occupancy rates make it explicit, it's pretty much the norm at most hotels whether stated as such or not.
I don't really find this relevant in the US because airline pricing is already the ultimate brutal form of pricing. Not only are they allowed to bill you whatever they want, they are never under any actual obligation to put you on the plane.
This seems surprising to me. I was under the impression that airlines are pretty low profit margin industries, pulling in only around 3-4% in a decent year, and that of that the airline tickets themselves are the lowest margin items percentage wise, with other things like baggage fees being much more load bearing.
Depending on which party you're talking about (airport, airline, etc), a no-bag economy ticket is often below cost, which is made up in volume and extras.
This is correct, the single passenger 'economy' ticket is usually a loss leader.
You can make the argument that airlines are companies that sell in flight beverages and also happen to fly a passenger airplane. The actual profit comes from an unusual sources, like deals with credit card issues for a "rewards" program that gives you frequent flyer miles
You are correct. As much as we like to bash airlines and their decisions, and liking low fares and quality service myself, it's objectively one of the worst businesses imaginable. Extremely high risk, low margin. Every year about a dozen airlines go bankrupt, get merged or bailed out. A small increase in the price of oil is a major risk for most of them.
Most of the more profitable markets have high competition not only by other airlines but also other forms of transportation. Very few airlines are swimming in cash and even those are only a couple bad years away from bankrupcy.
They are a low profit business, and that kind of liberty is stuff that pushes their profits even lower. They also always fail to differentiate from one another and are always competing on only price and how much fees they can keep hidden.
Personally, I do argue that it's worth it having tickets 10% more expensive and forcing the companies to always allocate all passengers, treat people humanely and etc. It's even worth it the 25% increase to make them let people carry luggage and avoid all the troubles that come with the optionality. But most governments seem to disagree.
Sure, you would subside people flying with luggage. It also reduces the time planes stay on the ground, stops the fighting between passengers for the always full luggage bins, clears the seats in case of emergency, and eliminates the largest hidden fee companies manage to put on their prices.
Anyway, the fact that you just assumed I personally fly with luggage is weird.
Airfare is the cheapest it has been in the entire history of commercial aviation except for immediately after 9/11 and the initial weeks of the global covid lockdown-- but both you and I know those periods don't count.
Most people are ok with terrible service because they save money.
Doesn't stop them from complaining, though.
And yes, "cheapest" includes taxes and all fees.
You can fly from New York to Paris non-stop for $150 if you are patient and flexible. (Please please please call me a liar.)
What's your patient/flexible technique? Let me know.
And you are not a liar - but your claim isn't true at all in Europe - see increased per-flight legislated fees and the loss of budget airlines. Price of flights between 2 destinations has increased by 25-40% in the last 5 years in most of Europe.
You can still get the madly cheap hop flights, but they are often pricing in income from our flights (or accepting even negative returns by pricing above the per-flight fees) because the planes need to be where you are going to fly a profitable flight later.
So the old status quo where genuinely cheap flights could be booked on a 7 day basis (e.g. cheap thursday-thursday flights) has been replaced by convoluted patterns to get the cheap flights (you usually need to leave on Monday, return on Saturday (if your source airport has lower demand than the destination) or vice versa. I suggest based on flights in the US becoming cheaper, that this is due to government intervention.
I get saving the environment and all that. But let me pay more taxes monthly, don't charge the airline £15 minimum making a bunch of flights unviable. Don't make booking a holiday or conference flight so unpleasant and annoying. I always have to tradeoff wasting a day or two with paying 50-150 euros extra.
It's not the worlds biggest problem, but making that decision is a regular additional dilemma I didn't want in my life. I wish for the days when you could get just normal timetabled flights at good costs if the month (e.g. February) was unpopular for travel. Now those months really aren't cheaper.
All I did was go to Expedia and put in JFK and CDG and $149 on Tuesday, July 15th on Norse Atlantic Airways popped up. Return flights the next week were $200-300. Round trip with a one-week stay were ~$500.
Round trips in September are $386-500 depending on the day and duration of the stay. The $386 fare was for a tuesday-to-tuesday week stay and I might just take it, I will be bumping up against use-or-lose limits for PTO by then. There are fewer crowds in September and the weather is really nice.
>Not only are they allowed to bill you whatever they want, they are never under any actual obligation to put you on the plane.
With exceptions, once you have paid for a ticket all commercial passenger airlines are obligated to transport you under their contract of carriage.
All airlines must do this, I even looked up the contract of carriage for the shittiest airline I could think of and Frontier has this to say:
>Involuntary -- If insufficient passengers volunteer, passengers who cannot be accommodated on the flight will be denied boarding and Frontier will provide transportation on a Frontier flight to the same destination. After a passenger’s boarding pass is collected or scanned and accepted by the gate agent, and the passenger has boarded, a passenger may be removed from a flight only for safety or security reasons or in accordance with Section 3 of this Contract of Carriage.
They must also compensate you. If being denied boarding delays you for 1-2 hours you get 2x the cost of the fare up to $1550 and 2+ hours 4x up to $2150.
And they still have to put you on a plane:
>A passenger denied boarding, voluntarily or involuntarily, pursuant to this section, will be transported on Frontier’s next available flight on which space is available and at no additional charge.
Contracts of carriage are pretty much boilerplate but all of this is to say: if you pay, show up on time, and aren't denied boarding for a safety reason airlines are obligated to transport you to your destination.
One of my co-workers had a flight delayed so long that the alternative flight they offered would have him stay on the plane at the destination airport and begin his home journey immediately.
> they are never under any actual obligation to put you on the plane.
It's true that airlines wield pricing power but their Contract of Carriage, buried under more fine print than a payday loan agreement, does impose obligations. Rule 21 of United's Contract explicitly allows refusal of transport, but Rule 4 confirms that a ticket with a confirmed reservation constitutes a binding agreement to provide service, absent violations by the passenger (like failing to check in). Rule 25 further mandates denied boarding compensation when overselling occurs, because even in brutal airline economics, a confirmed reservation isn't merely a suggestion, it's a contractual commitment, however creatively airlines may interpret "commitment." Of course, involuntary bumping, force majeure, and the ever-convenient "operational decisions" let airlines off the hook. But to claim they have no obligations is not true.
Cruises are especially bad for this. I’ve never gone, but I’ve looked at but after I had 3 independent people tell me to take one in the span of a few months. Most are priced assuming 2 people in the room and if you’re solo it seems like they expect you to buy 2 spots.
I’ve seen a couple where they have a few solo cabins, but the amount of effort to surface this stuff turns me off to the whole thing.
The only reason I’m still half looking is that it seems like the easiest way for a random person to set foot on Antarctica, which would be a cool thing to check off the bucket list.
Ease is relative especially considering cost, but that's the kind of thing that having a good travel agent is good for (eg: finding someone with knowledge of where to stay in Chile and who to hire for a charter flight or boat trip). Economies of scale kinda kick in though so a cruise is probably the least expensive.
>if you’re solo it seems like they expect you to buy 2 spots
Cruises are probably more complicated because they price things other than your cabin into the "experience." (Though I think the Queen Mary 2 a few years back was slightly less than 2x for just me.) But the random Marriott doesn't really care if there is one of you or two when it comes to pricing.
Well, they mostly don't. They're often using the same bedding. Most toiletries are squirt containers these days. I don't think toilet paper is that expensive. And another towel or two to wash is probably not a big deal. And to the degree the hotel has a restaurant or bar they probably come out ahead. Your hotel may take a different approach but it's near universal (perhaps outside of resorts) that hotels charge the same for 1 or 2 guests.
Citation needed. In my experience it's entirely the opposite: it's nearly universal that hotels charge more for two guests than one.
You can easily verify this on Booking.com, where the search results show price per room and how it varies based on how many people are in that room and whether they're adults or children.
Is this a non-U.S. thing perhaps? I’ve never in my life seen a U.S. hotel charge more for double occupancy, outside of special packages that include e.g. meals for each guest.
2 vs 1 doesn’t significantly impact space or cleaning labor, unless you’re staying in a super minimalist itty bitty unit (which I rarely find exists anymore)
If there's two beds, maybe. If one bed, doesn't matter how many people sleep in it. Maybe twice the towels?
I'll say over the years most places do not respect the "if the towel is not on the floor don't replace it". I'm fine with reusing a towel to dry off twice, but some hotels change them every day, even when their signage is indicating a protocol to prevent that sort of waste.
The other things priced into the "experience" are why I call out cruises separately. With a hotel, I get it, a room is a room. But a solo cruiser is eating half the food, drinking half the drinks, taking up half as many seats at shows...
Maybe that's the problem. Cruises rely on people spending a lot of extra money onboard the ship, or drink packages, nicer dinners, excursions, etc... fewer people doing that, with less social pressure to spend extra, means less money for them and they have to make it up somewhere.
Isn't the cruise capacity still limited by the number of rooms? So saving peanuts on drinks and cheap food probably doesn't make that big of a difference for them.
There are a couple travel agencies in Ushuaia that sell open cabins at steep discount for cruises heading across the Drake Passage. If you've got a little flexibility in your schedule, you can set foot in Antarctica for a lot less than if you bought a ticket anywhere else.
also: be sure to make offerings to the sea gods before sailing because crossing the Drake Passage can be... exciting.
Ships going to Antarctica often offer single beds in shared cabins.
When I went there, I booked the cheapest bed (maybe $6500 in 2013) in a three-person cabin. It was early season and the ship wasn't full, so the company filled it with backpackers waiting for last-minute discounts in the hostels of Ushuaia. Because I had paid the full price, they upgrade me two classes to a much nicer two-person cabin. And then halfway through the trip, the ship delivered some staff to a museum. The other guy got their cabin, and I got the one we had shared.
Go to Ushuaia, and book a normal ship just like all other folks do. You will have 100x more rewarding experience from all of it, guaranteed. Its not just destination but whole road to it that make such trips worthwhile and you will keep remembering it for rest of your days.
Cruises are for folks, how to say it politely... who gave up on any form of adventure or excitement in their lives. Dont be that person, not yet at least.
I just invited myself along on a "girl's cruise" to Alaska that my wife was doing with her friend (who's actually my second cousin). As the third person in the cabin, my fare only cost $99, plus some fees, compared the several thousand each my wife and cousin paid.
There were quite a few solo travelers we met on the cruise, though - I think they mostly had solo inside cabins with no view.
It is strange balance, but in cruising there is expectation that money is spend outside the base fare on extra experiences. So getting double money from double occupancy is important. Cost of basic food doesn't scale that much. And these extra revenue opportunities is also why occupancy beyond double is so much cheaper.
You can make the same argument about food too: buying chicken at Costco is way cheaper per pound than in Whole Foods or Aldi. Are they also penalizing single people? No: buy more, pay less per unit.
The hotel also cannot easily split and recombine rooms and beds on demand. They have to decide upfront how many single-person and two-person rooms to build, based on what they perceive the market desires.
(Saying all this with respect for those who value privacy more than me )
Hostels are for this market, no? Share physical infra (bathroom/heating/walls) with other humans (aka strangers) and you get the same family discount. You're not obligated to pay the premium unless you want your own bathroom and own personal space like families tend to want
As in: families don't get a discount, they just amortise the cost of privacy that you also seem to specifically need/want. but many solo travellers don't care to pay for that.
Hostels often offer private rooms, to varying degree of privacy. But i've certainly stayed at hostels that offer very comfortable single private rooms with private bathrooms for a third the cost of a local hotel room. Expensive for a hostel, but great value for the privacy.
But if you're traveling with your family, just get hotel rooms. Hostels only came up in the first place in response to a gripe about solo travel.
The point is you are paying for one bed, one living area, one bathroom, whether you are a single traveller or as a couple. I’m in a hotel room at the moment with a bed and a sofa, can host 4 people or me, it’s the same size. At breakfast I usually sit on a table which can seat 4, but certainly one that can seat 2. I use almost all the resources a couple do, and spend less at the bar in the evening, so I’d expect to pay the same or even more.
I’ve done hostel and like that option when there is a private room. I often/always travel with electronics and things that I want to feel comfortable leaving behind, and I don’t like leaving my laptop and game consoles unattended in communal spaces.
It's probably also worth noting that the majority of these hotels and Airbnbs are also designed to accommodate two or more travelers. Thus the complaint isn't really "single-person rooms are priced that same as two-person rooms," but rather "single-person rooms don't exist, which means I have to pay for more space than I need." In this sense it's not really any different than any other product that you wish was sold in smaller quantities.
It's probably a bit of a mixed bag. Beds are reasonable for two people (Usually a queen/king or a couple queens). But there may be only one sitting chair. Two people can manage but hotels split the difference a lot of the time.
I doubt the difference is minimal. Forget the size of beds, the point is that a hotel with 200 single-person rooms has twice the beds, twice the bathrooms, roughly twice the walls, etc. than a hotel with 100 two-person rooms.
A hotel hosting 100 single people will be roughly the same size and operating costs as a hotel hosting 100 couples, even if the rooms had a 3’ bed rather than a 6’ bed
And thus could be 3’ smaller
At least here in Europe there are plenty of hotels with solo traveller rooms (<=120 cm beds). But still not uncommonly priced at 80-95% of a double occupancy doublebed-room.
I often book a double for myself (often for the same price or €10 more) for a bigger bed.
1. I don't want to stay in a hostel. See below for more on this; but, hostels, at least the ones I have researched, have bunk rooms and shared facilities. Hard pass for me.
2. I don't like sharing a bedroom and, especially, a bathroom in someone's home when they may be there. There's simply a different level of security (potentially false, I understand) in a hotel vs a rented room in a house.
Families who travel together also share rooms and facilities, so if that's a hard pass for you then you wouldn't be happy with the "discount" of traveling as part of a family either.
I appreciate the pedantry; but, there’s a significant difference between several random someone(s) having travelers diarrhea in a shared bathroom and my family.
The point is multiple people sharing facilities get discounts. It’s nothing more sinister than that. The hotel charges per room, and rooms include facilities. The costs for the hotel don’t depend on how many people are staying in that room.
Right, but my point is that you're now no longer complaining about the concept of offering discounts for room-sharing. Now you're complaining that there's no one you would be comfortable sharing a room with.
Reframing it to how it sounds to me: you'd like to temporarily reserve a massive amount of real estate (relative to your human body) from a city's housing reserve and not be forced to pay any more for that than the family who would put 4 people in that same footprint.
It may have been 5 years ago or so, yes late 2020, when I had a ridiculous idea to visit Hollywood to see a concert. And I considered staying in a hostel in the area.
"Hostel" may mean different things in different parts of the world. When I was growing up, I heard about "youth hostels" that were mostly in Europe and mostly providing inexpensive accommodations to college-age people who were backpacking through the continent or had a Eurail Pass for traveling, etc. But I have never stayed in one.
When I surveyed a few hostels in Hollywood, it seemed that they were indeed targeting college-age people. Furthermore, they were cultivating a "package deal" atmosphere where there were day trips and coffee hours and programmed activities, for residents to do while they were there. And with limited privacy and shared facilities, there could be bustling activity and interruptions of sleep all night long. They did not seem like places to check in, crash overnight and leave in the morning. And that is probably calculated to appeal to the clientele who are not homeless and did not simply save up $40 by panhandling during the past week.
> Traveling solo is already brutal because hotels and Airbnbs are priced on the assumption of two travelers
The cost for the hotel and Airbnb doesn't really change a lot, if there is more than one person staying in the room. More or less another set of towels and a bit more soap. Even providing rooms with single beds only brings down the costs marginally.
When travelling on your own just go to hostels instead of hotels and you-ll both pay much less (prices normally are per person, not per room) and you'll meet more people who are open to interacting with other solo travellers.
> Traveling solo essentially costs double automatically because of lodging
Travelling with somebody else brings costs down. Hotel rooms have the same surface for single and double occupancy (in fact they are usually the same rooms!). Even if you remove the surface of one single bed, the room stays almost the same. So, it’s much cheaper for 2.
> I guess as a family be grateful that all hotel rooms come with a 50% (or more) discount per traveler?
This is not always the case. A two-bedroom hotel suite on average costs more than two standard rooms. This happens because the vast majority of rooms are twin/double and cheap hotels often don't offer suites at all.
At a given location two travellers would be chosing from e.g 100 options and at least some of these would be budget/discount offerings. In the same location a family of four would have to chose from 10 options and likely none of them are budget/discount.
Now consider that you HAVE to travel during the school holidays so competition for these damn 10 options increases and the price for both hotels and tickets easily goes up 2-3x.
There are some situations where a family of four would get a better price per person but most of the time it's the other way round.
Or it could just be a certain way of framing things?
But for the benefit of this debate I'll state my bias. Almost all my travel is as a group.
But in most other facets of life, we save by buying more, right? (buying wholesale, buying bulk, etc).
So I've actually had the other feeling... if I'm buying 4 tickets at once, can I get a bit of a volume discount? And I'm not sure that's what the airlines are doing here (I don't ascribe any altruism, it's probably more that families were getting cold feet with increasing prices), but I like that I get some kind of cheaper rate when I'm buying 4x of something, just like in just about every other purchase in life.
Everything hinges on filling the airplane as often as they can. A blend of solo and group travel is probably easier to fill planes. Looking at prices alone is only part of the picture, imo. Group travelers are also more likely to pay for at least 1-2 bags, which brings in some extra $$.
To add on to this, the issue in the article is really more about one-way tickets than single passenger, if you buy a round-trip ticket for that flight the difference in price goes away. In fact, a single passenger round-trip ticket that includes the flight in the article is cheaper than buying the one-way ticket on its own (as in, both tickets _together_ are less than the one-way, it's cheaper to buy the round-trip and skip the return flight). Google suggests that one-way tickets get uniquely screwed because they're often used for business-related travel, but I don't really see anything definitive.
You can also get screwed in the other direction where groups are more expensive - airlines will sometimes bump every ticket in a group to a higher fare level even if they still list one or two tickets at a cheaper price for smaller groups.
We as a society already penalize people without families:
1. Higher taxes and fewer deductions
2. Higher workplace performance expectations
3. Higher costs in every aspect of life
4. Fewer options eat out, expensive solo tickets at events etc.
This is just one more example in a long list of examples of how being by yourself is penalized in the society.
I mean, you almost always can? During COVID, there was a certain degree of reservations required--min 2 people. But it's pretty darned rare. And I say this as someone who has eaten out solo many hundreds of times. (And tend to eat at fairly decent restaurants.)
This is extremely uncommon in my experience, to the point where I've really only heard of it happening secondhand. I've seen people eating alone everywhere from fast food to Michelin star restaurants and done it myself many times. Where have you seen it?
Yeah I used to think that until I had a family. In reality it's more like:
1. Taxes are more punishing because you're spending half your disposable income on children, and most of it probably comes from one earner. You can say "don't have children if you can't afford it" all you like, but you wouldn't be alive if nobody had children, so it's quite selfish of anyone to be anti-children.
2. For men performance expectations are the same but now you have to somehow simultaneously be at work and also pick up your children from school at 3pm. Oh and don't forget you have to somehow cover like 80 days of school holidays a year. For women... well you can legislate that being off work for 2 years doesn't matter all you want; in reality it is a major disruption to careers.
3. Childcare is far more expensive than any increased cost I experienced for being single, with the possible exception of not being able to share rent with a partner. But once you have children... rent for a family is more than double rent for a one bed flat.
4. Yeah price me up a skiing holiday for a family of 4. Now do it for a single person (and double it if you like).
The very reason that discounted family tickets exist is that families wouldn't buy any tickets otherwise because they would be too expensive. It's the same reason student discounts exist. It's called price discrimination.
I do agree it's pretty annoying and feels unfair though. The optimum group from a price point of view is really a couple, not a family.
> you wouldn't be alive if nobody had children, so it's quite selfish of anyone to be anti-children.
It gets into philosophical territory, but the default "having a pulse = good" thinking is pretty shortsighted IMO. Life is inherently suffering and no one got a yes/no prompt before being born.
For a society it's not philosophical. If it wishes to exist past a few decades then it needs children, simple as that. Therefore societies are (and should) be skewed towards that.
Yes, that's just a necessity for the persistence of a society. Otherwise there's no point in even organizing as one. I'm not making a value judgment by the way, just an objective statement. I was also once part of a "DINK" and someone who thought would not have children, I have no qualms with that, but there's just no point in prioritizing that segment.
I'll ask this in response: why does society need to exist at all?
Obviously ideas like yours are ingrained into us at a biological level and it logically makes sense if we want to survive as a species... but there is no inherent reason other than "just because" right?
Well yeah, because of our ingrained sense of morality & self-preservation. But we're talking about the policies of society so it's kind of pointless discussing them if you don't accept that society should exist in the first place.
It's fairly irrelevant to the discussion. All societies that choose not to exist also choose for all their policies about (not) reinforcing children to not exist.
While there are people who wish that "yes" was a "no" instead, they form an exceedingly small portion of the general population. Most people are happy they exist.
I think what's more angsty is replies like this. You can't possibly fathom anything other than the default so you fallback to slop like this.
Yes, life can suck and I'm not saying we need to suicide as a species because of that. But, individuals can experience a much larger percentage of suffering than joy. So is it unreasonable to at least consider that possibility rather than going "haha you were brought into this world, suck it up and be happy"?
Dogs are not people. Society does not rely on the continued existence of dogs. Do you see any governments enacting policies to make people have more dogs?
> when is discrimination ok?
When it makes things more moral/fair. Do you object to student discounts? Progressive taxes? You seem to be having a knee-jerk reaction to the word "discrimination". It's also called "price differentiation". Maybe that sounds less bad to you?
I went to buy tickets to a comedy show last year and they wouldn’t let me buy a single ticket. I had to buy 2. It quite literally doubled the cost, and then a seat went empty.
If someone were to buy 3 tickets, it could just as easily leave an orphaned seat.
I've seen it twice now, both times within the past couple years. I'm not sure if it is the venue of the performer that imposes it, but it's really bad. To get single tickets, people are basically left to sit and wait for all the other seats to be bought, then hope there are single person gaps they can fill.
Is it possible to distinguish between society penalizing being single and society incentivizing having children? Since society's existence requires that people have children (even in the fairly short term, someone younger has to be around to take care of the older folks) it seems reasonable to incentivize it.
I guess it's all relative, lower taxes for A compared to B looks like higher taxes for B compared to A, but I suspect most of this comes from a) incentivizing people to form as many families w/ children as possible and then b) since there are so many families w/ children, people build businesses that assume most people will be in families.
I think even calling it "society incentivizing people to have children" is a bit of a stretch, since in most cases the tax advantages are unlikely to result in a net financial advantage given the financial costs of raising children. In most cases the thought isn't "I'm ambivalent about having children but I will do it for the financial benefits" and rather "I'd like to have children, but it's very expensive, and the tax advantages slightly lessen the expensive."
This has been my experience as well, childcare alone is a pretty big part of my budget. I am definitely not better off financially by having a toddler :D
I still think of it as incentivizing in the same way the EV rebate helped encourage me to buy my first EV, even if the cost of the car still was more than I would have been willing to pay for an ICE car. It made a difficult thing (slightly) less difficult.
Incentivizing doesn't have to mean that the incentive alone makes it worth to have children. It just means that it makes it a better deal than it would have been without the incentives.
Single also differs from being in a childless couple e.g. in your early 20s.
To get on the ladder today, 5 years sharing rent is priceless. Then once you do, you get child benefits. Many people are single late in life too. So I don't think it's something you can equate.
When a 25-year-old lands a senior role in 10 years at 35, it's because someone else's 13-year-old grew up, graduated college, and got hired as a junior. Promotions are 10% Crushing It, 90% dumping your grunt work on some poor sap too young to know better.
Society is a pyramid scheme, and, like all pyramid schemes, bringing more people in is ultimately more valuable than actually selling the LuLaRoe or whatever.
That sounds a lot like a subsidy, which I'm generally not a big fan of. Sure you and I benefit from it, but it doesn't seem fair to a solo traveler.
That said, I have to imagine the reasoning behind it having to do with assuming some large percentage of solo travelers are on work expense trips, so squeezing the company for a few more dimes. The article assumes as much -
> It's just another way for airlines to continue “segmenting” their customers, charging business travelers paying with a corporate card more while offering a better deal to families on the exact same flight.
A lot of companies I've worked for don't even do corporate cards, they just tell you to pay for it and submit for reimbursement.
All of that rabble out of the way, it feels like it would be impossible to identify business vs leisure customers up front, so it sounds like solo leisure travelers are caught in the crossfire.
A solo traveler can decide to take a trip because they saw a good fare very trivially: you're not going on a trip with 2 days notice just because a fare "tipped the scale" when you need 10x the planning and logistics, and the airlines know that.
They're not doing it to entice families to travel, they just know solo travel is associated with higher incomes and want to extract more money.
Bulk discounts don't "penalize" smaller purchases, they reward larger purchases.
Companies offer bulk discounts on basically... everything.
This is like pointing out that the Dollar Store penalizes people for buying small quantities and thus suggesting that Costco should raise prices to "make it fair".
No, it is discrimination based on marital/family status.
If they were willing to sell me 5 flight coupons for a discount, that would be acceptable. There is nothing I can do as an individual to take advantage of the discount.
Nonsense. The airline doesn't ask your marital/family status. They simply offer a bulk discount.
By your logic, Costco is also "discriminating based on marital/family status" by selling bulk at discount. Costco doesn't sell "buy 1/5 a toilet paper package, come back and get the other 4 1/5 later". They sell the whole package up front, use it or lose it.
That's how bulk discounts work.
Heck, you could say that a gallon of milk discriminates against you because you have to pay way more to buy a pint of it, and you can't "come back later for the other pints at the same price".
This is absurdism to the highest degree.
You are welcome to book flights with friends, or even organize a flight-share program and go in on flights with strangers. Bulk doesn't discriminate. I know folks who go in together on Costco bulk because they can't use it all. Make the system work for you.
> People will look at this as penalizing single travelers and want everyone to have the lowest fare, but that’s not the real alternative. A flat fare would bring solo prices down and group rates up so the blended average is the same.
So it’s still penalizing being single. Single travelers are subsidizing group rates. They are being penalized for not buying multiple. You didn’t explain how it’s not a penalty to buy as one person
Part of what makes it seem shady here is that airline ticket prices are pretty opaque. If they advertised it as a group discount, it would be received differently.
Airline pricing in general is pretty opaque. Not hospital pricing opaque, but still pretty opaque. It's one of the few things we regularly purchase where the price changes almost daily (both up and down). For example, bus and train tickets are pretty much the same price each day for the same route. For airlines, I'll often check the price on some future night to see if it is cheaper or not.
Distance train at least may (or may not depending on location/country) be quite a bit cheaper for advance purchase but maybe doesn't fluctuate as much day to day.
Like medicine, the price is a negotiation point in a complex web of probabilities. Air travel can be more transparent because the probability network is simpler and the spread is narrower, but they’re both dealing with realities of providing predictable service under volatile demand and group payer conditions.
Maybe even if it was a possibility before, it wasn't used and now airlines have enough data and market power to actually make different prices for groups
(By the way, if it's about inflating prices for individual, then it's not really volume discounting... it just appears this way on the outside)
If you read the article than you'd understand it's about degree of discount to which two or more passengers are receiving. In some cases two tickets is almost as cheap as one ticket. If these prices converge it would actually make sense to buy two tickets for one traveler if you value comfort and can afford it.
I would guess this is about middle seats. No one wants them but if you’re part of 2+ party you’re much more likely to take one. The alternative is two aisles side by side but those are tricky to get as the plane fills up.
"It's just another way for airlines to continue 'segmenting' their customers, charging business travelers paying with a corporate card more while offering a better deal to families on the exact same flight."
All my solo flights over the last year were wedding related. That is probably a huge cash cow for the airline and hotel industry. The hotel is basically never full even with the hotel block so it is probably a very welcome cash infusion for them at an otherwise sleepy locale.
As a business traveler I actually want the price to be as high as possible while satisfying the company rules on airfare. The fare is fully reimbursed, so a higher fare means I get more points on my credit card.
Now the company rules on airfare will probably reference something like the least-cost logical fare. So it is in a business traveler's interest for all airlines to raise prices simultaneously.
I thought everybody booked aisle and window and left the middle unbooked. If you get lucky, you have an extra seat; if not, the middle seat will almost always be willing to swap for one of the other two and you can still sit together.
But then if the plane is full you are stuck in a middle seat whereas, like gp pointed out, choosing window + aisle for a two-person booking almost always lets you fallback to window + middle or middle + aisle if the middle seat does get filled so there is really no risk in taking the chance.
Because they may change their plans. They could be a no-show (which will affect your return flight). They could call and change the flight without your knowledge. They could add extras to the trip and charge it to your card.
People are flaky, and being on the same itinerary with the same PNR as someone else means your trip is in their hands.
Some sort of service that sat on top of bookings would have its own set of terms and conditions that you agree to, which would at least disincentivize them from acting against your interest.
You're going to end up sitting next to a stranger anyway if you're flying alone. Nobody says you have to become friends, but I wouldn't mind having in common with my seatmate that we're both the kind of people who don't take the standard option at face value.
If anything, booking together with a stranger would allow you to leave an empty seat between you which is less likely to be filled than if you leave two empty seats next to you.
And the service could even be set up to give you some choice over the stranger (at the expense of less matches) like setting a maximum weight.
Any time I do select a seat in advance, I try to pick my window seat where someone already has the aisle one. It works surprisingly often to get an empty seat in the row!
I've always thought there's a difference between who you book with and who's on your itinerary. Very rarely do I say I'm traveling with anyone unless we're staying in the same room. I guess these fares do specifically state that, but I have a very hard time imagining anyone at the gate would care, they're typically doing the bare minimum as they should.
A company can figure out the premium and just average it out across the pax who book thru them. Further they could risk-manage no-shows or other bad behaviour based on ratings and feedback. It's just wasting everybody's time to go thru intermediaries.
I can foresee that backfiring when you miss your connection and end up having to stay somewhere unexpected overnight, and then the airline will only pay for one room for both of you.
Traveling together does not imply that you're rooming together. It's probably a bit of a fight with the airline to get them to pay for it, but then everything is a bit of a fight with the Airline.
Speaking as a fat person, air travel is horrible and I'll happily drive a couple thousand miles to avoid flying.
On a flight to Greenland I spent six hours smashed up between the window and a stranger (constant, sweaty, skin-on-skin contact) because they put three fat guys right next to each other on a full flight. I'd rather have taken a couple months of vacation and ridden the icebreaker in.
No business class on the Pituffik rotator. The only other option is flying through Copenhagen (good luck getting the company to pay for that) or sitting in a jump seat on a C130 with your shins against the cargo.
I mean, it is kind of optimal. Fat guys will experience constant, sweaty, skin-on-skin contact in a flight anyway, so placing them together reduces the total constant, sweaty, skin-on-skin contact experienced.
A fat guy next to a skinny person doesn't experience skin-on-skin contact. Which is why I do everything I can to get an aisle seat and hope the middle seat is empty or has a skinny person in it.
Ask the airline, they're the ones that choose narrower seats than the manufacturer's recommendations. I assume this was a budget flight or one of the airlines like American Eagle that service smaller airports?
Narrowing them further can allow even more people to fit, uncomfortably. The fact that you have any space at all is because larger people have to fit somewhere.
I don't particularly want to make life choices based on what's most economically efficient for airlines, but you do you I guess. And while my being fat is definitely a result of my life choices, that's certainly not the case for all of us.
Regardless of what size you believe everyone should be, the airlines have to deal with the size that people actually are. They have made the choice to size their seats in a way that causes this problem. They could have just plastered "no fatties" at the ticket counter, or maybe had a section of seats reserved for fat people at a somewhat higher price point and required people over a certain size to use them, but instead they've chosen to sit us all together. And they do so with the knowledge that judgemental assholes will just blame the fatties instead of them.
But keep playing their game, you appear to be good at it.
The airlines are dealing with the size people are by, in your example, preventing those oversized for their chosen seat from negatively impacting others.
> And while my being fat is definitely a result of my life choices, that's certainly not the case for all of us.
It literally is. No matter the genetic predisposition, you need a caloric surplus to get fat.
> They could have just plastered "no fatties" at the ticket counter, or maybe had a section of seats reserved for fat people at a somewhat higher price point and required people over a certain size to use them, but instead they've chosen to sit us all together.
They do provide bigger seats at a higher price point though. You have chosen not to make use of them and then blame the airline. If you are big enough that sitting next to someone your own size causes you discomfort then you would be encroaching the space of someone smaller sitting next to you. That wouldn't be fair to them.
What if larger sizes of clothes were priced higher, since they use more material? I wear a small in almost every case so wouldn't affect me, but man it'd be nerve wracking for a lot of Americans.
In most cases the cost of fabric itself is a pretty minor part of the garment price- you're paying for someone to design the clothes, assemble them, ship them, and operate a store that sells them, and those costs are pretty much the same for small and large sizes. Adjusting the price based on the amount of fabric used would probably end up being a dollar or so for the things most people wear on a daily basis.
Unusually large or small sizes can end up more expensive (and/or only manufactured in limited quantities) because they're not commonly bought and they take up space on the shop floor and in inventory which could be used for things with higher turnover. (Edit: Also at the extreme ends of sizing simply enlarging or shrinking the pattern won't work well, you have to redraft it so it sits correctly on a petite or plus-sized frame).
Are you at all concerned the airlines will remove the air from the cabin if you try this, just to emphasize that you’re not going to get a refund this way?
Anyway I’ll be across the aisle with hydrogen balloons paying less than you either way. Enjoy your flight!
Mass and volume both count, in an aircraft, don't they? And many oversize humans present logistical and safety challenges:
- Taking up more than one seat with girth, needing a seatbelt extender.
- Fitting through narrow passages, tight turns, limited headroom
- An unconscious person may need to be lifted, and transported somehow
- Toilets and life vests and other safety equipment, rated for your "standard average man size"
- Total mass of passengers/cargo, and its distribution on the aircraft itself
Elevators in the US have a maximum weight and maximum occupancy rating.
Arguably, if obesity is a disability, then appeal to the Americans with Disability Act or similar regulations, but from a standpoint of safety and the common good, it does not seem unreasonable for airlines to charge extra to cover their expenses above.
As someone who's not overweight I don't think I would care. What I really wish they'd charge for is overhead luggage. I wish they'd charge so much that no one bothers with it.
Is there any reason or are you just generally a sadist?
Overhead luggage is the only place you can take anything fragile. You have no control over how your checked baggage is handled and anything you have to take with you into the cramped seating space will get squished.
One reason that I would value is that it would speed up boarding and deplaning. As you correctly point out, the prevailing overhead luggage system provides a benefit to some travelers, potentially to the detriment of others. It's a tradeoff.
I seriously doubt it would make much difference for deplaning - people already stand in the isle with their luggage out of the compartment long before the doors open.
For boarding it might speed things up but often boarding is done before all checked luggage is loaded so it will probably not let you take off faster either.
I agree that it wouldn't cause the doors to open any sooner for deplaning, but once they did, people could just ... leave. The people standing in the aisle with their luggage out of the compartment are the ones who started in the aisle seats. People in the other seats need to get out, reach up, pull down, get organized. Sometimes they have to salmon their way back from their actual seat to the compartment several rows behind them because that's where they had to stow their carry-on because the people seated in row 30 put their bag over row 16 when they boarded[1].
Similarly, for takeoff I agree that it wouldn't necessarily save time, net. But it would help with the frustration of standing in line, backed up on the jetway while everyone is struggling with setting up the initial conditions for the deplaning scenario I described above. At least people could get seated sooner and be comfortable for longer while they're waiting for takeoff.
Yep, that’s who we use. It is half the cost of VZW’s cheapest plan with more data and better QCI. The latter aspect turns out mattering a lot more than I thought.
I don't have any data, but it wouldn't at all surprise me if single/business travelers are way more likely to cancel or change flights, and this is just pricing that into the ticket cost.
I did it for free once, but I think the airline was just bad at math. I flew most of the legs of my flight. Then the last leg a hurricane showed up and they offered me an opportunity to rebook since it was likely to cancel the flight.
When I rebooked, the airline gave me a credit for the round trip flight in total. I only had to book a one way ticket on the last leg, so I obviously was able to "afford" the flight without additional expenditure on my part.
I'm skeptical. Not sure why as a solo traveler I'd be more likely to cancel than a family vacation. If anything, more can go wrong in the case of the latter.
Business traveler maybe. Not my money and business stuff happens. (Usually they want you to book non-refundable because it comes out ahead in the end.)
Canceled flight is not canceled trip. For refundable trips at least, solo travelers are more likely to cancel and book another flight. Source: done this myself.
I've flown a good number of transatlantic routes with my family, and I've also flown over alone.
From my anecdata, being single greatly increases your chances of being bumped off a full flight. And it's a lot cheaper and easier to compensate/redirect one person than a family of four.
You aren't really "bumped". They are legally allowed to oversell the plane. You were never getting on the plane in the first place. They just use weasel wording language like the flight being "full" when they communicate it
I did once have an airline offer me something like $1500 USD and 50,000 bonus miles if I was willing to cancel my flight, but that was days in advance.
> You were never getting on the plane in the first place.
I'm not sure that's true. The airlines are gambling that at least one person will miss the flight for whatever reason, and they'll get away with overbooking.
But, of course, when they loose that gamble, it's really a passenger that looses. The house always wins.
From the conclusion, they seem pretty confident that this is not "business as usual":
> Whenever this pricing strategy began, this is a massive change in how airlines set prices – and one that will likely catch many travelers off guard.
> Unlike shopping at retail stores or Costco, bulk discounts are unusual for airlines – at least not just for booking just two passengers instead of one. And these higher fares for one passenger are the opposite of what we typically see, where travelers booking for two passengers or more wind up getting charged more per person than a single passenger.
It probably just depends on how full the flight is. If the plane is empty, there will be discounts for families, because they want to sell tickets, and families are price concious. Solo travellers usually are not.
If the plane is on a popular route, you'll pay through the nose, and there sure as hell won't be any group discounts. You'll pay almost full price for a two year old, because they know they'll fill the plane no matter what.
> Unlike shopping at retail stores or Costco, bulk discounts are unusual for airlines – at least not just for booking just two passengers instead of one. And these higher fares for one passenger are the opposite of what we typically see, where travelers booking for two passengers or more wind up getting charged more per person than a single passenger.
This isn't strictly true. Airlines have long offered bulk pricing through travel agencies and booking partners.
This was prevalent until the early 2000s, it is far less common today. Corporate discounts used to exist based on guaranteed minimum legs in some time period. This ended when airlines discovered only flying full planes made them more money, making bulk discounts more pain that they were worth.
You've never seen a 2+1 free or 3+1 free pricing in stores? We have them frequently here in Europe on some things. This is same thing and tbh I am surprised it took so long.
And as a father of 2 small kids not complaining at all, having multiple kids these days is brutal also financially, any small thing that helps is very much appreciated.
> You've never seen a 2+1 free or 3+1 free pricing in stores?
Yes and as a solo person I can choose to buy those and take advantage of it in the same way a family can. Usually it's consumables like a 6 pack of bagels or something that might cost $5 which I'll 100% use.
This airline approach comes off much different, because as a solo traveler there is no benefit or reason why I would ever buy 2 tickets to save $80 per ticket since I wouldn't get any value from it and the cost of 2 tickets even with a discount will be greater than 1 non-discounted ticket.
Most airlines seem to also charge to pick your seats. I wonder if people who travel as a group end up paying that discount back to sit together.
Airfare typically has group anti-discounts, where if you buy more tickets on a single reservation than tickets available at the lowest fare bucket, they’d sell you all the tickets at the higher fare instead of mixing fares
I think they because so custom in their pricing that is becoming insane... I wish they are more predictable in how much things cost, it is almost like weather, how much will airfare cost.
If you can predict consumer demand, trade policy, interest rates, and money printing schedules then you can predict prices. Problem is we can't predict any of those things.
Good idea in principle. In practice this could invite unscrupulous actors, or people who flake out at higher rates than close family -not that families can’t flake out, but I’d imagine it’d be a lower incidence.
There are already websites, like Going, for getting flight deals. As a solo traveler who doesn’t have to coordinate with anyone and can pack light, I can jump on the deals when they come up and save a lot more than what a regular price group rate probably is. Looking at my upcoming trip, I got it for 50% off the current pricing, for solo or a couple.
Coordination with others also makes booking take longer and tends to fix dates and locations, which makes it hard to grab a deal when they come up.
You have to invert the order of how most people plan travel.
Typically people plan in this order:
1. Where to go
2. When to go
3. Check airfare
Flip it on its head:
1. Keep an eye out for cheap flights from your home airport
2. Pick one of those destinations
3. Choose when to go
Not exactly inverted, but the flight goes from last to first.
I had Ireland in my head for my next trip, but then Italy showed up last week. That sounded pretty good, so I checked the dates and found a flight that fit in my schedule, and booked it.
It’s not great for getting a flight around a conference, wedding, or some other event you are planning around. But when you know you want to take a vacation to somewhere and sometime this year, it can cut flight costs in half.
A single flight ends up paying for the cost of the subscription 10x over, and then some.
Also, it could be somewhere near where you want to go. I had tickets to Croatia about 5 years ago, but hand to cancel due to the pandemic. I didn’t know anything about Croatia when I booked, but I figured the worst case scenario was I catch a quick ferry or flight over to Italy once I’m there. Once you’re over there it’s cheap to go one country over. That flight to Croatia was $289, that cheaper than a flight to Nashville for me, which is only about an 8 hour drive.
I did the same thing when I booked a flight to Sweden. I didn’t know if I’d like it there, so from there I booked a connection to Copenhagen for next to nothing. I spent a week in Copenhagen, but then ultimately did go back to Sweden for week, which I ended up loving. I’m glad I didn’t spend the whole trip in Copenhagen.
Another deal I got that stood out was to Tokyo. I think I paid around $550 give or take. A coworker of mine has family there and goes on a regular basis, he was floored by that price. He always pays over $1k, and usually closer to $1,500.
Ultimately it’s just an alert service for flights that are abnormally low. If you have a specific destination in mind, Google Flights is pretty good at showing when the cheapest time to travel is, giving a booking date of today. Of course it fluctuates over time, which is where the alerts come in.
It’s saved me thousands. Though I probably would have only taken about 20% of the trips I have without it.
Thanks yeah that was my strategy I'm flexible with travels, I remember setting Paris and Lisbon after to see what flights I could have. Maybe it was focused on USA. Maybe their emails was getting my SPAM folder, IDK what happened but I never found what I was looking for.
I got my own flight tickets by looking on my own though.
Tbh this makes perfect sense. As someone who worked in airline revenue management for 11 years, it always seemed a little odd that the sales tactics people use everywhere else - group discounts, BOGO, etc - weren't being used by airlines (yes, group bookings could often get discounts, but usually for much larger groups).
What's remarkable here is that airlines waited this long to do it. Sad news for me as a usually solo traveler who prizes flexibility, but I understand airlines wanting to prioritize groups and more locked-in fares.
> As someone who worked in airline revenue management, it always seemed odd that the sales tactics people use everywhere else weren't being used by airlines
Remember the really old days when air miles were awarded solely by distance flown rather than by dollars paid? This made no business sense. It meant that someone who flew the cheapest tickets could rack up as many points as a last-minute first class business traveller who spent massively more ticket.
With the airlines I’m familiar with, it seems that pricing anomaly has been corrected. Air miles are much more correlated with the price of the ticket these days. Eg., you don’t even get air miles on the cheapest tickets on one airline I know.
But I still wonder why the airline industry created an air miles formula so disconnected from the value of the passenger in the early days.
The first mileage program was introduced only a couple years after deregulation, so it probably made a lot more sense at the time as a rough proxy for revenue, and revenue management at the airlines wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as it is today.
In the early days you didn't have the internet where people would share every tiny anomaly, allowing thousands of people to exploit them. Even then, you had a few people realize they could do mileage runs, but it was considered additional revenue and the perks of doing so weren't valued nearly as highly as they are today.
Alaska still uses miles flown. It’s pretty annoying since I’m doing some short hop flights with them that cost a lot and I get basically nothing for it.
I actually prefer the miles per $ model since it seems more fair for everyone. Obviously it’s less exploitable but that’s exactly the sort of thing everyone is complaining about.
I usually expect to see BOGOs, group discounts, etc advertised. If airlines showed the seat price along with a group discount I don't think people would have a problem with the price difference.
There are lots of things airlines could offer, that they don't. They are all obsessed with "loyalty", why not sell travelers multi-packs (6 flights over the next 12 months) or subscription-like plans? Why a 24-hour cancellation period even for flights booked months ahead... they could certainly extend that to allow for "low-risk" booking or even charging a small fee for the right to cancel up to, say, 3 months in advance. Auctioning off unsold seats. Selling itineraries with multi-day layovers in a 3rd city (basically adding a second destination to a vacation). Lots more with a bit of creativity.
Yes, most domestic US airlines have eliminated change fees. But as you point out, it's not possible to get your money back and it's not easy to make changes if you don't have an alternative trip in mind. Cancellability is valuable (see hotel bookings), and yet, people over-value the option - sometimes out of laziness, or they forgot, or they go with the original plan. I have difficulty believing airlines would lose very much if they offered full refundability up to about 3 or 4 months in advance, but they would probably get more bookings, most of which would likely not get cancelled.
A lot depends on your travel habits. Credit on my usual airline (United) is pretty much a no-brainer within the year--I'll use it barring circumstances where losing some airline dollars are the least of my problems. Less so than it used to be but still.
For hotels, I still tend to pay the premium. I don't expect to cancel but, especially for an extended city stay, it can be a fair amount of money and the premium usually isn't that huge.
Agreed. I participated in a points-based package that used to be offered by AirAsia. It was about $300 for 30 points. Flights between cities/countries were 1 to 3 points each, I probably got 3x my money's worth and still had about 4 or 5 points left over.
Airlines do sell multi-packs with flexible rebooking. At least United and Delta did pre-covid, I haven’t had a use since then though.
With even moderate airline status rebooking/cancellations work more or less as described. I can’t recall the last time I haven’t been credited for a flight I ended up not taking, even I did a full on no-show.
Without status airlines sell refundable tickets with similar flexible rules, but I assume there is some adverse selection included in how they need to price those fares.
Yes most airlines have eliminated change fees, and rebooking isn't too difficult for business travelers. But that's not a refund, and people booking 6 to 12 months out tend to be families going on vacation or to a specific event. So if something changes, there isn't always something else to book, or at least not on that specific airline. Further, what you call "moderate" status - the lowest level - has been raised to require an enormous amount of spending on any one of the major airlines. And don't get me started with "you only need to spend 100k on their credit card..."
Realistically most frequent travelers go for business and they don’t care about cost that much so subscription packs wouldn’t be valuable. That’s why loyalty programs instead offer non monetary perks or those that accrue to the individual (points).
I dont really buy into the businesses don't care about cost - maybe for top execs - but companies are obsessed with expense reports and accounting for every penny, reducing per diems, limiting hotel cost ceilings, booking through a specific travel agency, etc. And of course most companies are working overtime in every other department to slash costs, why would travel be spared? Being able to buy flights in bulk and save money seems like it would be highly appealing to finance managers.
Of course, there are exceptions. Governments seem to be some of the worst violators, they really do not care about costs and in many cases they egregiously throw money around for 5 star luxury hotels, first class flights, etc.
When I'm in the store and I see 3 for 2 or whatever, I can think, yeah, ok, I'll be using three of 'em soon enough, fine I'll get 3.
But when I travel, it's not like I'm gonna call up my buddy and ask him if he'll join me on a flight so I can get a better ticket price. And if I'm going on vacation with my family, I'm not going to buy individual tickets, like why would I do that?
If these things aren't advertised or even made visible in any way other than the user happening to discover them, they're not sales tactics, they're just scumbag business tactics to prevent pricing transparency.
Seems intuitive: the group passengers are likely to have to cough up another 5-10% more at the time of check-in, in order to sit together, so it all evens out.
Unfortunately you don't see that in the EU because the EU would rather have centrally controlled financial transactions than act in the interest of the citizens.
it's crazy how if you just want a ticket now it could be say $700 but if you wait the same trip can take $150 different providers, I was the former just got something listed on Google Flights with SouthWest but yeah
Airlines are always doing a negative to consumers. Squeezing passengers, gouging, treating them like they're numbers on a spreadsheet - knowing their options are limited - seems modus operand by the airlines.
We need a passenger bill of rights, not just for the airlines, but also how passengers are treated in airports, by security, and concrete cause of action for consumers when airlines misbehave.
> In this case, the rationale for charging solo travelers more is fairly clear: It's just another way for airlines to continue “segmenting” their customers, charging business travelers paying with a corporate card more while offering a better deal to families on the exact same flight.
I think the explanation is wrong and the author is jumping to conclusions. Airlines have long offered "bulk" discounts. Their goal is to fill as many seats on a flight as possible. What we are seeing here is their group pricing creep into their direct sales.
I think the governments only role is to guarantee the planes don’t fall out of the sky or crash into each other, and then the airlines can price compete.
No they aren't. Public utilities generally give you only one choice of provider, which is why they need to be regulated because of their monopoly status.
When you fly, you usually have a choice between lots of airlines. So there's nothing "public utility" about it whatsoever.
Airports, on the other hand, are considered public infrastructure. There are also sometimes routes that are only served by one airline, which are sometimes regulated accordingly. But that isn't the general case, nor should it be.
Taxi companies, moving companies, and rideshare are all considered utilities and there are generally multiple choices of provider. Being a monopoly is not a requirement to be a utility.
- That it's still way cheaper in most instances to book a return (especially where the "trip" straddles a weekend) rather than a one-way fare when travelling long haul - even if you just throw away the return flight.
- That you can sometimes get access to totally different inventory by booking a package including accommodation, even if that accommodation is one night in a shared dormitory in a hostel (which you just don't go to).
At least group discounts have a recognizable economic rationale. But in these examples you are getting a strict superset of the same SKU (OK, maybe the change rules might be a little tighter, but not in a way that's perceptible) for less money.
Try London to Washington, DC and watch your eyes pop
You might be able to find an airline where it doesn't happen, but you will definitely find airlines where it does. Just verified with Delta and British airways and Lufthansa
Round trip business (with a return 6 months later) was 2,530 Swiss francs. So I screenshotted the horrible one-way price to go in my expense report, and then booked the round trip ticket.
No, I was meant to book a one-way ticket, since I was moving offices. But I had to have evidence to show that booking round-trip was cheaper in case anyone questioned why I had purchased round-trip instead of one-way.
US to Europe open jaw can be weird. I've done somewhat crazy return to origin European city (typically Heathrow) to avoid. And then I've had times when it's been perfectly reasonable.
I've definitely come across the one-way flight costing more than a return
My guess is the airlines think one-way people are business folks (so the price doesn't matter because it's getting expensed), whereas return travelers are paying their own way
Singapore Airlines has been doing (used to do?) do this for ages: "GV2" was a Great Value fare for 2 people, "GV4" for 4.
I also don't find this particularly outrageous. Lots of companies do volume discounts, and traveling as a family gets very expensive very fast.
Finally, the fare bucket system used to price flights usually works the other way to penalize groups. If there's 3 seats left in the cheapest bucket, and you try to book for 4, you don't get 3 cheapest plus 1 more expensive, your entire group gets priced at the more expensive bucket.
I'm not sure if this is driven to incentivize having children, but the more general point of incentivizing children for the good of society is a valid one. A society that stops having kids (or importing them) will cease to be a society before too long.
Or, a society will just start having children again once the population gets small enough that having children becomes a more optimal decision or the supply of things that make having children optimal is increased...
it truly is unfortunate how society punishes you for being single. Insurance, tax, credit worthiness, even health care.
i wonder how low birthrate societies like Japan or South Korea are like, is it worse to improve birthrates? or is it better because being single isn't an anomaly?
More importantly, the number of single/solo people isn't even low in the US. If i had to ballpark it, at least a quarter of the population is like that. Lots of married people travel solo for business for example. Why aren't some airlines playing capitalism well by offering "business elite" flights where solo travelers get a loyalty discount and there are no children on the flight? Not for all destinations but at least popular ones like to vegas or NYC <-> LAX.
Airlines already do that for business routes. Just in the other direction on pricing.
Pre-Covid there were a couple airlines playing around with business class only flights from NY to LA.
Solo business travelers are where the money is made. The rest of the seats tend to exist at cost or even below to fill up the plane. Airlines would be pretty foolish to try to lower margin on the least price sensitive class of traveler they service.
This must be a new thing, because I've experienced the opposite. I needed to book 7 tickets, and the price was much higher than a single ticket. So I ended up adjusting the quantity and saw the price increase at around 4 tickets. So I ended up splitting the purchase into two transactions. However, after purchasing the first 4 tickets, the following price for single ticket was now slightly increased - so they were really playing some games or perhaps there was limited availability that was adjusting prices real-time.
They are trying to charge as much as possible while filling the plane. If you take too many seats they need to up the price for the next person because someone needs to say too expensive and not fly on that plane
Many airlines operate on the following model. Imagine the plane has a hundred economy seats. The seats will be split into groups of 10, each group has it's own price.
Group 1 seats cost 100 dollars
Group 2 seats cost 110 dollars
...
Group 10 seats are 350 dollars
Your group order got the last seats in group N and the first seats in group N+1
This is where the myth of "booking late gets you the cheapest seats" comes from. If an early booking passenger cancels their Group 1 seat it becomes available to buy again and it is still a group 1 seat even if every other seat has been sold. So late cancellations can make cheap seats available again.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadPeople will look at this as penalizing single travelers and want everyone to have the lowest fare, but that’s not the real alternative. A flat fare would bring solo prices down and group rates up so the blended average is the same.
Traveling solo essentially costs double automatically because of lodging, and it kind of sucks there’s a double whammy with airfare where, unlike lodging, the penalty doesn’t actually make any sense.
I guess as a family be grateful that all hotel rooms come with a 50% (or more) discount per traveler?
I’ve regularly seen larger cars with more capacity equal to medium sedans.
Otherwise can’t one just rent the room as a solo guest, and just have someone come through later, as long as there isn’t an obvious group activity going on inside the room?
You can make the argument that airlines are companies that sell in flight beverages and also happen to fly a passenger airplane. The actual profit comes from an unusual sources, like deals with credit card issues for a "rewards" program that gives you frequent flyer miles
Most of the more profitable markets have high competition not only by other airlines but also other forms of transportation. Very few airlines are swimming in cash and even those are only a couple bad years away from bankrupcy.
Personally, I do argue that it's worth it having tickets 10% more expensive and forcing the companies to always allocate all passengers, treat people humanely and etc. It's even worth it the 25% increase to make them let people carry luggage and avoid all the troubles that come with the optionality. But most governments seem to disagree.
You are asking for people who fly without checked luggage (as I usually do) to subsidize you.
Anyway, the fact that you just assumed I personally fly with luggage is weird.
Most people are ok with terrible service because they save money.
Doesn't stop them from complaining, though.
And yes, "cheapest" includes taxes and all fees.
You can fly from New York to Paris non-stop for $150 if you are patient and flexible. (Please please please call me a liar.)
If you are not patient $500 is more typical.
Twenty years ago was a $800 ticket.
Thirty years ago that was a $1000 ticket.
And you are not a liar - but your claim isn't true at all in Europe - see increased per-flight legislated fees and the loss of budget airlines. Price of flights between 2 destinations has increased by 25-40% in the last 5 years in most of Europe.
Thanks to efforts like increasing the per-flight fees "because of high inflation" (these fee increases are still going up several years later): https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/why-travel... and loss of airlines like Flybe.
You can still get the madly cheap hop flights, but they are often pricing in income from our flights (or accepting even negative returns by pricing above the per-flight fees) because the planes need to be where you are going to fly a profitable flight later.
So the old status quo where genuinely cheap flights could be booked on a 7 day basis (e.g. cheap thursday-thursday flights) has been replaced by convoluted patterns to get the cheap flights (you usually need to leave on Monday, return on Saturday (if your source airport has lower demand than the destination) or vice versa. I suggest based on flights in the US becoming cheaper, that this is due to government intervention.
I get saving the environment and all that. But let me pay more taxes monthly, don't charge the airline £15 minimum making a bunch of flights unviable. Don't make booking a holiday or conference flight so unpleasant and annoying. I always have to tradeoff wasting a day or two with paying 50-150 euros extra.
It's not the worlds biggest problem, but making that decision is a regular additional dilemma I didn't want in my life. I wish for the days when you could get just normal timetabled flights at good costs if the month (e.g. February) was unpopular for travel. Now those months really aren't cheaper.
Round trips in September are $386-500 depending on the day and duration of the stay. The $386 fare was for a tuesday-to-tuesday week stay and I might just take it, I will be bumping up against use-or-lose limits for PTO by then. There are fewer crowds in September and the weather is really nice.
https://imgur.com/Wn43raL
With exceptions, once you have paid for a ticket all commercial passenger airlines are obligated to transport you under their contract of carriage.
All airlines must do this, I even looked up the contract of carriage for the shittiest airline I could think of and Frontier has this to say:
>Involuntary -- If insufficient passengers volunteer, passengers who cannot be accommodated on the flight will be denied boarding and Frontier will provide transportation on a Frontier flight to the same destination. After a passenger’s boarding pass is collected or scanned and accepted by the gate agent, and the passenger has boarded, a passenger may be removed from a flight only for safety or security reasons or in accordance with Section 3 of this Contract of Carriage.
They must also compensate you. If being denied boarding delays you for 1-2 hours you get 2x the cost of the fare up to $1550 and 2+ hours 4x up to $2150.
And they still have to put you on a plane:
>A passenger denied boarding, voluntarily or involuntarily, pursuant to this section, will be transported on Frontier’s next available flight on which space is available and at no additional charge.
https://www.flyfrontier.com/legal/contract-of-carriage
Contracts of carriage are pretty much boilerplate but all of this is to say: if you pay, show up on time, and aren't denied boarding for a safety reason airlines are obligated to transport you to your destination.
(in the US)
It's true that airlines wield pricing power but their Contract of Carriage, buried under more fine print than a payday loan agreement, does impose obligations. Rule 21 of United's Contract explicitly allows refusal of transport, but Rule 4 confirms that a ticket with a confirmed reservation constitutes a binding agreement to provide service, absent violations by the passenger (like failing to check in). Rule 25 further mandates denied boarding compensation when overselling occurs, because even in brutal airline economics, a confirmed reservation isn't merely a suggestion, it's a contractual commitment, however creatively airlines may interpret "commitment." Of course, involuntary bumping, force majeure, and the ever-convenient "operational decisions" let airlines off the hook. But to claim they have no obligations is not true.
I’ve seen a couple where they have a few solo cabins, but the amount of effort to surface this stuff turns me off to the whole thing.
The only reason I’m still half looking is that it seems like the easiest way for a random person to set foot on Antarctica, which would be a cool thing to check off the bucket list.
Cruises are probably more complicated because they price things other than your cabin into the "experience." (Though I think the Queen Mary 2 a few years back was slightly less than 2x for just me.) But the random Marriott doesn't really care if there is one of you or two when it comes to pricing.
I imagine 2 people use roughly twice the bedding, towels, toiletries, etc., on average.
You can easily verify this on Booking.com, where the search results show price per room and how it varies based on how many people are in that room and whether they're adults or children.
I'll say over the years most places do not respect the "if the towel is not on the floor don't replace it". I'm fine with reusing a towel to dry off twice, but some hotels change them every day, even when their signage is indicating a protocol to prevent that sort of waste.
Maybe that's the problem. Cruises rely on people spending a lot of extra money onboard the ship, or drink packages, nicer dinners, excursions, etc... fewer people doing that, with less social pressure to spend extra, means less money for them and they have to make it up somewhere.
Also the more people on the ship means more chances of selling high margin add ons like drink packages, excursions and so on.
also: be sure to make offerings to the sea gods before sailing because crossing the Drake Passage can be... exciting.
When I went there, I booked the cheapest bed (maybe $6500 in 2013) in a three-person cabin. It was early season and the ship wasn't full, so the company filled it with backpackers waiting for last-minute discounts in the hostels of Ushuaia. Because I had paid the full price, they upgrade me two classes to a much nicer two-person cabin. And then halfway through the trip, the ship delivered some staff to a museum. The other guy got their cabin, and I got the one we had shared.
Cruises are for folks, how to say it politely... who gave up on any form of adventure or excitement in their lives. Dont be that person, not yet at least.
There were quite a few solo travelers we met on the cruise, though - I think they mostly had solo inside cabins with no view.
You can always stay in Motel 6 for $20/night.
Frozen > 5kg or so?
Hostels are for this market, no? Share physical infra (bathroom/heating/walls) with other humans (aka strangers) and you get the same family discount. You're not obligated to pay the premium unless you want your own bathroom and own personal space like families tend to want
As in: families don't get a discount, they just amortise the cost of privacy that you also seem to specifically need/want. but many solo travellers don't care to pay for that.
But if you're traveling with your family, just get hotel rooms. Hostels only came up in the first place in response to a gripe about solo travel.
Most single people own and sleep in double beds, so there's no sense in which a double bed is "designed to accomodate" two travellers.
The issue is more that discounted single room rates would encourage unofficial double stays, which would lose significant income.
I often book a double for myself (often for the same price or €10 more) for a bigger bed.
1. I don't want to stay in a hostel. See below for more on this; but, hostels, at least the ones I have researched, have bunk rooms and shared facilities. Hard pass for me.
2. I don't like sharing a bedroom and, especially, a bathroom in someone's home when they may be there. There's simply a different level of security (potentially false, I understand) in a hotel vs a rented room in a house.
"Hostel" may mean different things in different parts of the world. When I was growing up, I heard about "youth hostels" that were mostly in Europe and mostly providing inexpensive accommodations to college-age people who were backpacking through the continent or had a Eurail Pass for traveling, etc. But I have never stayed in one.
When I surveyed a few hostels in Hollywood, it seemed that they were indeed targeting college-age people. Furthermore, they were cultivating a "package deal" atmosphere where there were day trips and coffee hours and programmed activities, for residents to do while they were there. And with limited privacy and shared facilities, there could be bustling activity and interruptions of sleep all night long. They did not seem like places to check in, crash overnight and leave in the morning. And that is probably calculated to appeal to the clientele who are not homeless and did not simply save up $40 by panhandling during the past week.
The cost for the hotel and Airbnb doesn't really change a lot, if there is more than one person staying in the room. More or less another set of towels and a bit more soap. Even providing rooms with single beds only brings down the costs marginally.
I'm pitching the movie to the Hallmark channel right now.
Travelling with somebody else brings costs down. Hotel rooms have the same surface for single and double occupancy (in fact they are usually the same rooms!). Even if you remove the surface of one single bed, the room stays almost the same. So, it’s much cheaper for 2.
DINK > Solo >> anything else
This is not always the case. A two-bedroom hotel suite on average costs more than two standard rooms. This happens because the vast majority of rooms are twin/double and cheap hotels often don't offer suites at all.
At a given location two travellers would be chosing from e.g 100 options and at least some of these would be budget/discount offerings. In the same location a family of four would have to chose from 10 options and likely none of them are budget/discount.
Now consider that you HAVE to travel during the school holidays so competition for these damn 10 options increases and the price for both hotels and tickets easily goes up 2-3x.
There are some situations where a family of four would get a better price per person but most of the time it's the other way round.
It comes out of the family budget either way.
But for the benefit of this debate I'll state my bias. Almost all my travel is as a group.
But in most other facets of life, we save by buying more, right? (buying wholesale, buying bulk, etc).
So I've actually had the other feeling... if I'm buying 4 tickets at once, can I get a bit of a volume discount? And I'm not sure that's what the airlines are doing here (I don't ascribe any altruism, it's probably more that families were getting cold feet with increasing prices), but I like that I get some kind of cheaper rate when I'm buying 4x of something, just like in just about every other purchase in life.
You can also get screwed in the other direction where groups are more expensive - airlines will sometimes bump every ticket in a group to a higher fare level even if they still list one or two tickets at a cheaper price for smaller groups.
1. Higher taxes and fewer deductions 2. Higher workplace performance expectations 3. Higher costs in every aspect of life 4. Fewer options eat out, expensive solo tickets at events etc.
This is just one more example in a long list of examples of how being by yourself is penalized in the society.
Obviously that's a pure economic thing you can't get mad at as tables are designed for 2+ and you're trying to get in during a high traffic time.
...except for the average $300,000 cost of raising a child in the US. That one would seem to rather balance out all those others.
1. Taxes are more punishing because you're spending half your disposable income on children, and most of it probably comes from one earner. You can say "don't have children if you can't afford it" all you like, but you wouldn't be alive if nobody had children, so it's quite selfish of anyone to be anti-children.
2. For men performance expectations are the same but now you have to somehow simultaneously be at work and also pick up your children from school at 3pm. Oh and don't forget you have to somehow cover like 80 days of school holidays a year. For women... well you can legislate that being off work for 2 years doesn't matter all you want; in reality it is a major disruption to careers.
3. Childcare is far more expensive than any increased cost I experienced for being single, with the possible exception of not being able to share rent with a partner. But once you have children... rent for a family is more than double rent for a one bed flat.
4. Yeah price me up a skiing holiday for a family of 4. Now do it for a single person (and double it if you like).
The very reason that discounted family tickets exist is that families wouldn't buy any tickets otherwise because they would be too expensive. It's the same reason student discounts exist. It's called price discrimination.
I do agree it's pretty annoying and feels unfair though. The optimum group from a price point of view is really a couple, not a family.
It gets into philosophical territory, but the default "having a pulse = good" thinking is pretty shortsighted IMO. Life is inherently suffering and no one got a yes/no prompt before being born.
Obviously ideas like yours are ingrained into us at a biological level and it logically makes sense if we want to survive as a species... but there is no inherent reason other than "just because" right?
It's a strange thing of nature and evolution that it creates a species that can plan and execute its own intentional suicide.
Also... it's not society, it's the human species.
Yes, life can suck and I'm not saying we need to suicide as a species because of that. But, individuals can experience a much larger percentage of suffering than joy. So is it unreasonable to at least consider that possibility rather than going "haha you were brought into this world, suck it up and be happy"?
It is amazing how blatantly people will just admit "I agree with politics that benefit me even if they exclude others."
> Taxes are more punishing because you're spending half your disposable income on children
I probably spend on my dogs what you do on your children. Gosh life sure is hard because of my decisions. Where are my discounts and tax refunds?
> It's called price discrimination.
...and when is discrimination ok? Lets all say it out loud.
Dogs are not people. Society does not rely on the continued existence of dogs. Do you see any governments enacting policies to make people have more dogs?
> when is discrimination ok?
When it makes things more moral/fair. Do you object to student discounts? Progressive taxes? You seem to be having a knee-jerk reaction to the word "discrimination". It's also called "price differentiation". Maybe that sounds less bad to you?
If someone were to buy 3 tickets, it could just as easily leave an orphaned seat.
I guess it's all relative, lower taxes for A compared to B looks like higher taxes for B compared to A, but I suspect most of this comes from a) incentivizing people to form as many families w/ children as possible and then b) since there are so many families w/ children, people build businesses that assume most people will be in families.
I still think of it as incentivizing in the same way the EV rebate helped encourage me to buy my first EV, even if the cost of the car still was more than I would have been willing to pay for an ICE car. It made a difficult thing (slightly) less difficult.
To get on the ladder today, 5 years sharing rent is priceless. Then once you do, you get child benefits. Many people are single late in life too. So I don't think it's something you can equate.
When a 25-year-old lands a senior role in 10 years at 35, it's because someone else's 13-year-old grew up, graduated college, and got hired as a junior. Promotions are 10% Crushing It, 90% dumping your grunt work on some poor sap too young to know better.
Society is a pyramid scheme, and, like all pyramid schemes, bringing more people in is ultimately more valuable than actually selling the LuLaRoe or whatever.
That said, I have to imagine the reasoning behind it having to do with assuming some large percentage of solo travelers are on work expense trips, so squeezing the company for a few more dimes. The article assumes as much -
> It's just another way for airlines to continue “segmenting” their customers, charging business travelers paying with a corporate card more while offering a better deal to families on the exact same flight.
A lot of companies I've worked for don't even do corporate cards, they just tell you to pay for it and submit for reimbursement.
All of that rabble out of the way, it feels like it would be impossible to identify business vs leisure customers up front, so it sounds like solo leisure travelers are caught in the crossfire.
> A flat fare would bring solo prices down and group rates up so the blended average is the same
So... it is penalizing solo travelers?
A solo traveler can decide to take a trip because they saw a good fare very trivially: you're not going on a trip with 2 days notice just because a fare "tipped the scale" when you need 10x the planning and logistics, and the airlines know that.
They're not doing it to entice families to travel, they just know solo travel is associated with higher incomes and want to extract more money.
...is of course great when you personally are on the side benefitting.
Companies offer bulk discounts on basically... everything.
This is like pointing out that the Dollar Store penalizes people for buying small quantities and thus suggesting that Costco should raise prices to "make it fair".
If they were willing to sell me 5 flight coupons for a discount, that would be acceptable. There is nothing I can do as an individual to take advantage of the discount.
By your logic, Costco is also "discriminating based on marital/family status" by selling bulk at discount. Costco doesn't sell "buy 1/5 a toilet paper package, come back and get the other 4 1/5 later". They sell the whole package up front, use it or lose it.
That's how bulk discounts work.
Heck, you could say that a gallon of milk discriminates against you because you have to pay way more to buy a pint of it, and you can't "come back later for the other pints at the same price".
This is absurdism to the highest degree.
You are welcome to book flights with friends, or even organize a flight-share program and go in on flights with strangers. Bulk doesn't discriminate. I know folks who go in together on Costco bulk because they can't use it all. Make the system work for you.
So it’s still penalizing being single. Single travelers are subsidizing group rates. They are being penalized for not buying multiple. You didn’t explain how it’s not a penalty to buy as one person
One way or another, this increases profit for them.
That’s definitely a cherry picked example for the article, not the common scenario.
This is probably only on unpopular routes where they know they aren't going to fill the plane.
(By the way, if it's about inflating prices for individual, then it's not really volume discounting... it just appears this way on the outside)
"It's just another way for airlines to continue 'segmenting' their customers, charging business travelers paying with a corporate card more while offering a better deal to families on the exact same flight."
As a business traveler I actually want the price to be as high as possible while satisfying the company rules on airfare. The fare is fully reimbursed, so a higher fare means I get more points on my credit card.
Now the company rules on airfare will probably reference something like the least-cost logical fare. So it is in a business traveler's interest for all airlines to raise prices simultaneously.
Business travel is weird.
But someone should totally make a site for finding strangers to book the same flight with :)
People are flaky, and being on the same itinerary with the same PNR as someone else means your trip is in their hands.
And the service could even be set up to give you some choice over the stranger (at the expense of less matches) like setting a maximum weight.
Economic argument: fat people are more likely to make use of on-board food service despite high markup, so you want as many of them as possible.
On a flight to Greenland I spent six hours smashed up between the window and a stranger (constant, sweaty, skin-on-skin contact) because they put three fat guys right next to each other on a full flight. I'd rather have taken a couple months of vacation and ridden the icebreaker in.
Much better than subjecting someone who has made better life choices to the consequences of yours.
I don't particularly want to make life choices based on what's most economically efficient for airlines, but you do you I guess. And while my being fat is definitely a result of my life choices, that's certainly not the case for all of us.
Regardless of what size you believe everyone should be, the airlines have to deal with the size that people actually are. They have made the choice to size their seats in a way that causes this problem. They could have just plastered "no fatties" at the ticket counter, or maybe had a section of seats reserved for fat people at a somewhat higher price point and required people over a certain size to use them, but instead they've chosen to sit us all together. And they do so with the knowledge that judgemental assholes will just blame the fatties instead of them.
But keep playing their game, you appear to be good at it.
> And while my being fat is definitely a result of my life choices, that's certainly not the case for all of us.
It literally is. No matter the genetic predisposition, you need a caloric surplus to get fat.
> They could have just plastered "no fatties" at the ticket counter, or maybe had a section of seats reserved for fat people at a somewhat higher price point and required people over a certain size to use them, but instead they've chosen to sit us all together.
They do provide bigger seats at a higher price point though. You have chosen not to make use of them and then blame the airline. If you are big enough that sitting next to someone your own size causes you discomfort then you would be encroaching the space of someone smaller sitting next to you. That wouldn't be fair to them.
Is this some kind of satire? In many cases (for a whole slew of things), I feel like men pay less and get better service.
Unusually large or small sizes can end up more expensive (and/or only manufactured in limited quantities) because they're not commonly bought and they take up space on the shop floor and in inventory which could be used for things with higher turnover. (Edit: Also at the extreme ends of sizing simply enlarging or shrinking the pattern won't work well, you have to redraft it so it sits correctly on a petite or plus-sized frame).
Otherwise I would buy seats for my personal helium balloons on either side of me.
Anyway I’ll be across the aisle with hydrogen balloons paying less than you either way. Enjoy your flight!
- Taking up more than one seat with girth, needing a seatbelt extender.
- Fitting through narrow passages, tight turns, limited headroom
- An unconscious person may need to be lifted, and transported somehow
- Toilets and life vests and other safety equipment, rated for your "standard average man size"
- Total mass of passengers/cargo, and its distribution on the aircraft itself
Elevators in the US have a maximum weight and maximum occupancy rating.
Arguably, if obesity is a disability, then appeal to the Americans with Disability Act or similar regulations, but from a standpoint of safety and the common good, it does not seem unreasonable for airlines to charge extra to cover their expenses above.
Not allowed because they're too big to be carry ons.
Overhead luggage is the only place you can take anything fragile. You have no control over how your checked baggage is handled and anything you have to take with you into the cramped seating space will get squished.
For boarding it might speed things up but often boarding is done before all checked luggage is loaded so it will probably not let you take off faster either.
Similarly, for takeoff I agree that it wouldn't necessarily save time, net. But it would help with the frustration of standing in line, backed up on the jetway while everyone is struggling with setting up the initial conditions for the deplaning scenario I described above. At least people could get seated sooner and be comfortable for longer while they're waiting for takeoff.
[1] Based on a true story.
When I rebooked, the airline gave me a credit for the round trip flight in total. I only had to book a one way ticket on the last leg, so I obviously was able to "afford" the flight without additional expenditure on my part.
Business traveler maybe. Not my money and business stuff happens. (Usually they want you to book non-refundable because it comes out ahead in the end.)
Which is why the people involved take good care to prevent anything from getting in the way of those plans.
If you miss your flight when travelling solo, you disappoint only yourself. With a family the number of disappointed people increases accordingly.
From my anecdata, being single greatly increases your chances of being bumped off a full flight. And it's a lot cheaper and easier to compensate/redirect one person than a family of four.
I did once have an airline offer me something like $1500 USD and 50,000 bonus miles if I was willing to cancel my flight, but that was days in advance.
I'm not sure that's true. The airlines are gambling that at least one person will miss the flight for whatever reason, and they'll get away with overbooking.
But, of course, when they loose that gamble, it's really a passenger that looses. The house always wins.
Not always the case, you could be physically removed from the plane because the flight is full:
https://www.flyertalk.com/articles/overbooked-united-flight-...
Author will lose their mind when they buy 10+ of the same thing from AliExpress.
> Whenever this pricing strategy began, this is a massive change in how airlines set prices – and one that will likely catch many travelers off guard.
> Unlike shopping at retail stores or Costco, bulk discounts are unusual for airlines – at least not just for booking just two passengers instead of one. And these higher fares for one passenger are the opposite of what we typically see, where travelers booking for two passengers or more wind up getting charged more per person than a single passenger.
If the plane is on a popular route, you'll pay through the nose, and there sure as hell won't be any group discounts. You'll pay almost full price for a two year old, because they know they'll fill the plane no matter what.
This isn't strictly true. Airlines have long offered bulk pricing through travel agencies and booking partners.
And as a father of 2 small kids not complaining at all, having multiple kids these days is brutal also financially, any small thing that helps is very much appreciated.
Yes and as a solo person I can choose to buy those and take advantage of it in the same way a family can. Usually it's consumables like a 6 pack of bagels or something that might cost $5 which I'll 100% use.
This airline approach comes off much different, because as a solo traveler there is no benefit or reason why I would ever buy 2 tickets to save $80 per ticket since I wouldn't get any value from it and the cost of 2 tickets even with a discount will be greater than 1 non-discounted ticket.
Most airlines seem to also charge to pick your seats. I wonder if people who travel as a group end up paying that discount back to sit together.
On a more serious note, group discounts for services are very common and usually not something you can take advantage of as a solo customer.
Coordination with others also makes booking take longer and tends to fix dates and locations, which makes it hard to grab a deal when they come up.
Typically people plan in this order:
1. Where to go
2. When to go
3. Check airfare
Flip it on its head:
1. Keep an eye out for cheap flights from your home airport
2. Pick one of those destinations
3. Choose when to go
Not exactly inverted, but the flight goes from last to first.
I had Ireland in my head for my next trip, but then Italy showed up last week. That sounded pretty good, so I checked the dates and found a flight that fit in my schedule, and booked it.
It’s not great for getting a flight around a conference, wedding, or some other event you are planning around. But when you know you want to take a vacation to somewhere and sometime this year, it can cut flight costs in half.
A single flight ends up paying for the cost of the subscription 10x over, and then some.
Also, it could be somewhere near where you want to go. I had tickets to Croatia about 5 years ago, but hand to cancel due to the pandemic. I didn’t know anything about Croatia when I booked, but I figured the worst case scenario was I catch a quick ferry or flight over to Italy once I’m there. Once you’re over there it’s cheap to go one country over. That flight to Croatia was $289, that cheaper than a flight to Nashville for me, which is only about an 8 hour drive.
I did the same thing when I booked a flight to Sweden. I didn’t know if I’d like it there, so from there I booked a connection to Copenhagen for next to nothing. I spent a week in Copenhagen, but then ultimately did go back to Sweden for week, which I ended up loving. I’m glad I didn’t spend the whole trip in Copenhagen.
Another deal I got that stood out was to Tokyo. I think I paid around $550 give or take. A coworker of mine has family there and goes on a regular basis, he was floored by that price. He always pays over $1k, and usually closer to $1,500.
Ultimately it’s just an alert service for flights that are abnormally low. If you have a specific destination in mind, Google Flights is pretty good at showing when the cheapest time to travel is, giving a booking date of today. Of course it fluctuates over time, which is where the alerts come in.
It’s saved me thousands. Though I probably would have only taken about 20% of the trips I have without it.
I got my own flight tickets by looking on my own though.
550 USD for Tokyo is so cool, wow
What's remarkable here is that airlines waited this long to do it. Sad news for me as a usually solo traveler who prizes flexibility, but I understand airlines wanting to prioritize groups and more locked-in fares.
Remember the really old days when air miles were awarded solely by distance flown rather than by dollars paid? This made no business sense. It meant that someone who flew the cheapest tickets could rack up as many points as a last-minute first class business traveller who spent massively more ticket.
With the airlines I’m familiar with, it seems that pricing anomaly has been corrected. Air miles are much more correlated with the price of the ticket these days. Eg., you don’t even get air miles on the cheapest tickets on one airline I know.
But I still wonder why the airline industry created an air miles formula so disconnected from the value of the passenger in the early days.
"Congratulations! You flew 100,000 miles with us!"
"Congratulations! You spent $100,000 with us!"
I actually prefer the miles per $ model since it seems more fair for everyone. Obviously it’s less exploitable but that’s exactly the sort of thing everyone is complaining about.
For hotels, I still tend to pay the premium. I don't expect to cancel but, especially for an extended city stay, it can be a fair amount of money and the premium usually isn't that huge.
With even moderate airline status rebooking/cancellations work more or less as described. I can’t recall the last time I haven’t been credited for a flight I ended up not taking, even I did a full on no-show.
Without status airlines sell refundable tickets with similar flexible rules, but I assume there is some adverse selection included in how they need to price those fares.
Realistically most frequent travelers go for business and they don’t care about cost that much so subscription packs wouldn’t be valuable. That’s why loyalty programs instead offer non monetary perks or those that accrue to the individual (points).
Of course, there are exceptions. Governments seem to be some of the worst violators, they really do not care about costs and in many cases they egregiously throw money around for 5 star luxury hotels, first class flights, etc.
But when I travel, it's not like I'm gonna call up my buddy and ask him if he'll join me on a flight so I can get a better ticket price. And if I'm going on vacation with my family, I'm not going to buy individual tickets, like why would I do that?
You used to see "surcharge for visa" but visa made that illegal.
So now you see "discount for cash/debit", and everyone is happy!
We need a passenger bill of rights, not just for the airlines, but also how passengers are treated in airports, by security, and concrete cause of action for consumers when airlines misbehave.
We have a Sam's Club membership because buying in bulk is cheaper.
Edit: checked prices Sam's vs Meijer
I think the explanation is wrong and the author is jumping to conclusions. Airlines have long offered "bulk" discounts. Their goal is to fill as many seats on a flight as possible. What we are seeing here is their group pricing creep into their direct sales.
When you fly, you usually have a choice between lots of airlines. So there's nothing "public utility" about it whatsoever.
Airports, on the other hand, are considered public infrastructure. There are also sometimes routes that are only served by one airline, which are sometimes regulated accordingly. But that isn't the general case, nor should it be.
Public utilities include things like electricity, power, gas, sometimes telecoms. Being a monopoly is an inherent part of it.
- That it's still way cheaper in most instances to book a return (especially where the "trip" straddles a weekend) rather than a one-way fare when travelling long haul - even if you just throw away the return flight.
- That you can sometimes get access to totally different inventory by booking a package including accommodation, even if that accommodation is one night in a shared dormitory in a hostel (which you just don't go to).
At least group discounts have a recognizable economic rationale. But in these examples you are getting a strict superset of the same SKU (OK, maybe the change rules might be a little tighter, but not in a way that's perceptible) for less money.
But yes, in terms of money, it sure is waste to pay more for the flight.
You might be able to find an airline where it doesn't happen, but you will definitely find airlines where it does. Just verified with Delta and British airways and Lufthansa
One way business 6,032 Swiss francs.
Round trip business (with a return 6 months later) was 2,530 Swiss francs. So I screenshotted the horrible one-way price to go in my expense report, and then booked the round trip ticket.
So… you committed fraud? Cool?
I’m all for sticking it to the corporate overlords, but careful how far out you stick your neck.
My guess is the airlines think one-way people are business folks (so the price doesn't matter because it's getting expensed), whereas return travelers are paying their own way
I also don't find this particularly outrageous. Lots of companies do volume discounts, and traveling as a family gets very expensive very fast.
Finally, the fare bucket system used to price flights usually works the other way to penalize groups. If there's 3 seats left in the cheapest bucket, and you try to book for 4, you don't get 3 cheapest plus 1 more expensive, your entire group gets priced at the more expensive bucket.
i wonder how low birthrate societies like Japan or South Korea are like, is it worse to improve birthrates? or is it better because being single isn't an anomaly?
More importantly, the number of single/solo people isn't even low in the US. If i had to ballpark it, at least a quarter of the population is like that. Lots of married people travel solo for business for example. Why aren't some airlines playing capitalism well by offering "business elite" flights where solo travelers get a loyalty discount and there are no children on the flight? Not for all destinations but at least popular ones like to vegas or NYC <-> LAX.
Pre-Covid there were a couple airlines playing around with business class only flights from NY to LA.
Solo business travelers are where the money is made. The rest of the seats tend to exist at cost or even below to fill up the plane. Airlines would be pretty foolish to try to lower margin on the least price sensitive class of traveler they service.
Group 1 seats cost 100 dollars Group 2 seats cost 110 dollars ... Group 10 seats are 350 dollars
Your group order got the last seats in group N and the first seats in group N+1
This is where the myth of "booking late gets you the cheapest seats" comes from. If an early booking passenger cancels their Group 1 seat it becomes available to buy again and it is still a group 1 seat even if every other seat has been sold. So late cancellations can make cheap seats available again.