The problem with this isn't the difference in prices - charging less for buying in bulk is a normal thing that's probably been done by merchants since the invention of money.
The problem with this is the lack of communication. There's no advertisement of a bulk/family discount at any point during the pricing process, you just see a different price. That's the problem here, not the price difference itself.
My theory is that most same-day travel is for business, and businesses are far less price-sensitive than consumers and will just pay whatever.
I suspect this is what's going on here. Most solo travellers are for business, not consumers for holidays. The price difference here is huge – almost half – which is far beyond a bulk discount, we're talking about 1 person vs 2 people.
That's also why none of this is advertised: it's not a discount, but a "we think you can pay more, so we'll charge you more" type of thing.
Is that a good/bad/ethical/predatory thing? I don't know. Leaves kind of a bad taste for me though.
Without price discrimination, there is one price, and then there are two triangles "left" of the price: What consumers would have paid, but don't need to, that's the consumer surplus (between price and demand), and what producers would have sold for, but got more for, that's the producer surplus (between price and supply).
With price discrimination, what happens is that the producers "grab" some of that consumer surplus for themselves (as "price" is not a horizontal line anymore, but gets closer to the demand line).
So this is bad for consumers, good for producers. However, the producers can use the surplus to subsidize products for poorer consumers, so that a higher quantity of goods is sold.
Having said that, the airline market is very weird (oligopoly character, very perishable goods, ...)
Minimum stay durations, like advance purchase restrictions, are a common part of fare construction.
> That's also why none of this is advertised: it's not a discount, but a "we think you can pay more, so we'll charge you more" type of thing.
A surcharge for X vs a discount for ~X is the same thing, it's just how it's presented.
Technically all of this is advertised, it's published in GDS. People just don't really want to read the fare rules because it's boring and a ton of reading.
Econ101 says it’s a bad thing because of the deadweight loss occurring versus a single market price.
It also arrogates a lot of consumer surplus to the producer (the airline), which many would argue is bad from an ethical and inequality point of view.
It is a natural result of our economic system. Economists call it "extracting consumer surplus," and there are several mechanisms companies employ to get the population to pay them the maximum amount of money. Airlines indeed use the information they have about you and the flight you're booking to guess the maximum amount you'll pay- and that's the price they show you.
Obviously we, as consumers, feel taken advantage of because we wish we could pay less (and keep the surplus to ourselves). But this is going to happen in any capitalist system.
It can be an equitable thing as families traveling usually have less income per head than individuals.
It would be weird to specifically advertise this. Unlike say, buying a second pair of shoes - not many people will buy an extra plane ticket to save 30% off both.
With something like airfares, the business is still doing its half of negotiations: collecting bits of data about the buyer to determine a price; but, crucially, there’s no real way for the buyer to “talk back” and so the process seems arbitrary.
Not really. The "negotiation" is still there. Time limited discounts weed out consumers who need something immediately. Coupons weed out people who aren't willing to put the legwork to find them. Loyalty programs and app-based offers (eg. McDonalds) take all of this to the next level by sending targeted coupons based on whatever demographic/behavioral information they can glean from you.
That was kind of the premise of a movie I watched last night where a couples retreat offered a group discount for 4 couples or something.
So I could see it being "Bring your friends for 30% off!" being a cool summer promotion to beach destinations or something.
You can't advertise prices that constantly change.
This list of practices may sound like “shitting” on the companies but is just that - a list of their normalized practices.
The same way they have been observed to offer higher prices to iPhone users at times
They come up with schemes to rake in money based on market segmentation they run numbers on and have their booking systems setup in a way to make price comparison "difficult" for a normal user.
Here they don't even advertise it as a discount, so there's no ethical problem with raising the individual traveler price by x and lowering the family price by y so that the total profit remains the same.
In all honesty all this thread is people complaining about something they don't have a clue about. Airline pricing is insanely complicated, and this is for a reason. Airlines are not a luxury business, they barely manage to survive. If not all this dynamic pricing, special contracts with agencies, etc, they'd have to charge so much for a seat that you wouldn't pay and all this travel industry you are accustomed to simply wouldn't exist. The whole business is built on making somebody who crucially needs to fly pay as much, as he can, and then to make price attractive enough for the rest of us so that you can sell the rest of the tickets, so that flight can make any profit. And in the end, margins are super thin in this business.
Also, your question implies that you imagine that there is some simple enough "true price for a seat", which is so far from the truth, you have no idea. If you actually look at the price breakdown for a given ticket, there are literally dozens of components in it. It's not unusual that so called "fare" of a ticket (which is, like, "just price") may be literally $1, and the rest of $300 is various taxes, surcharges and payoffs I won't even try to start to explain here.
I mean, really, people here truly have no idea what they are complaining about. Airline pricing is not a thing you should hate.
There might be some benefits to price discrimination (which is in effect what a point systems achieves) but the collective time wasted dicking around with points isn’t worth it. Make all point systems illegal.
If you want to buy anything and just pick the first option then you probably will have worse results than someone that did research. Or someone that used coupons. Or someone that waited for a sale. Or someone that bought used. Etc etc
We obviously shouldn’t make all those behaviors illegal. There is an inherent time/money trade off in life. It’s actually the whole basis for economic activity (ie it’s why employers are able to pay you to do stuff for them) so stopping it would probably be quite bad.
The problem comes when the original seller doesn't want their price discrimination scheme to be thwarted by efficiency-improving arbitrageurs and takes measures to prevent that, because that's rent-seeking behavior and shouldn't be tolerated.
The airline wastes resources on their end, and so do the consumers. They're both doing what they're incentivized to do, but that's not what's actually efficient for society. The whole point of a good economy is that these two are always pulled into alignment (Efficient Market Hypothesis), but ours has failed in this case.
It was fascinating to chat with the software engineers at ITA Software.[0] Turns out flight routing (which everyone knows "should be" just a simple A*) is actually NP-Hard because of how convoluted the airline pricing systems are. At that company it was obviously a group of super smart people solving super hard problems..... and for what?
This is Kurt Vonnegut Jr's "Dynamic tension": muscles working against muscles, with no work being done. This is what Bullshit Jobs (good title, disappointing book) should have been written about.
To quote Eisenhower, this (lesser) scourge also
signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29425650 or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software
Which is adjacent to: Nearly everyone loses, because the house knows the odds and controls the terms and conditions of the rewards.
This is false. https://x.com/patio11/status/1902555603534295115
They do it by selling data, by points expiring, and by often only allowing points when seats would be empty otherwise.
And often retailers pay more at POS terminals!
This all ties into any rewards program. It's part of the package, even if points are granted for use.
This is really the whole point. The sale of data is much less lucrative than the purchases by the customers themselves, especially for the "nicer" cards.
If you are a CC company with wealthy clientele, they tend to spend more. This means that retailers are willing to offer deals/rewards to attract those clients, and also that you want to offer rewards to keep those clients.
This is why e.g. American Express has cards with great rewards, high annual card fees to keep the riffraff away, and retailers willing to take a larger % cut in order to have those cardholders shop at their store where they presumably purchase more.
You're not forced. This allows them to make extra money from people who don't bother, and offer discounts to price conscious people.
Time is money. Convenience too.
If points systems caused losses then nobody would have them. They’re money makers, and that money is coming from someone’s pocket.
> to get the full value of my money.
No one is forced to understand the system, but that means leaving some indeterminate amount of money/value in the hands of the predatory airline.
Just because some people won’t buy anything that isn’t on a coupon doesn’t mean coupons are bad.
Because you can save money by getting a cheaper flight by understanding how pricing works and adapting your purchasing strategy. Many consumer are willing to spend time and effort getting a better deal.
Which is bad for consumers and the broader economy.
On domestic tickets there's no YQ, YR or embedded Q surcharges anyways.
Domestic airfare in the US is down 36% adjusted for inflation since 1995. [1]
Even base tier status concentrated flying with any one carriers get you a waived checked bag, and so does pretty much any airline credit card. So basically you shouldn't pay more than $95 a year in checked baggage fees.
US airlines generally have sub-5% net margins which is why they find themselves in creditor protection every decade or so when the market turns. There's a long-running adage about investing in airlines.
[1] https://www.bts.gov/content/annual-us-domestic-average-itine...
It’s no different than clipping coupons or waiting till closing time to get pastries at a discount.
I mean, yeah, sure. Capitalism is totally stupid and wasteful and evil. Any proposals? Oh wait, no, I'm afraid I don't really want to hear any proposals on this subject. I sincerely wish we don't have to live in interesting times. (Alas, I'm afraid it's past the point we could wish that anyway, so…)
One flight will get you to your sister's wedding on time. The other won't. They don't have equivalent value, they can't be freely exchanged.
But someone should totally make a site for finding strangers to book the same flight with :)
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!
Not allowed because they're too big to be carry ons.
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.
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.
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.
People are flaky, and being on the same itinerary with the same PNR as someone else means your trip is in their hands.
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.
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).
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.
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?
- 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.
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
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.
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
But yes, in terms of money, it sure is waste to pay more for the flight.
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.
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-...
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.
You used to see "surcharge for visa" but visa made that illegal.
So now you see "discount for cash/debit", and everyone is happy!
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
You go to a bakery and he charges more because you wear a suit. You go to Europe, a guy in front of you buys a bread for €1, but same bread is €3 because you are tourist? Then you go to buy a toilet paper and same thing happens again because your ass is worth more?
If you are going to book for 3 passengers they charge three of you with the next level, more expensive fare.
But so far my favorite is they force you to buy seat if you travel with infant. You cannot select free random seat as their planes have rules to allow infants only on the seat near the window.
Anyone being upset about this is just looking for reasons to be upset and maybe should go outside more and get a hobby.
Larger groups are more price sensitive. They should pay less because they have more buying power when they buy ahead.
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.
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.
This isn't strictly true. Airlines have long offered bulk pricing through travel agencies and booking partners.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
also: be sure to make offerings to the sea gods before sailing because crossing the Drake Passage can be... exciting.
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.
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.
There were quite a few solo travelers we met on the cruise, though - I think they mostly had solo inside cabins with no view.
Also the more people on the ship means more chances of selling high margin add ons like drink packages, excursions and so on.
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.
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?
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.
Frozen > 5kg or so?
I'm pitching the movie to the Hallmark channel right now.
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.
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.
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.
It comes out of the family budget either way.
DINK > Solo >> anything else
> 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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
One way or another, this increases profit for them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If someone were to buy 3 tickets, it could just as easily leave an orphaned seat.
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.
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.
...is of course great when you personally are on the side benefitting.
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)
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.