FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Fares higher for Preferreds?
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Old Jul 26, 2012, 10:47 am
  #13  
ksl11
 
Join Date: Aug 2011
Location: CLT
Posts: 91
Maybe I'm naive, but I find it hard to believe that this is happening, for a variety of reasons. First, the "scheme" would probably be uncovered very quickly, and when that happened, it's safe to say that there would be a lot of angry customers, all of whom happen to be the airline's biggest revenue generators. Second, for all the bad publicity and anger this would cause, it would be very easy for the preferred customer to work around this and puchase the lower-priced ticket. And what would the airline do at that point - say, "Whoops, when we gave you that price, we didn't realize you were one of our most FF's. Now that we know, we are tacking on the $10/$25/$50/whatever preferred customer surcharge." Third, in our lawsuit-happy country, would the airline be opening itself to charges of discrimination? Let's just pick one one possible case and say, for instance, an elderly person in a wheelchair (let's make him/her a minority and a veteran, too) needs to fly around the country frequently for medical treatment. How many lawyers would jump to sue on behalf of the poor old guy/gal who is being viciously targeted by the big, bad airline? And then the airline would have to say, "We're sorry. We only intended to target rich 50 year-old men in business suits."
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