LHR/MEL/Europe FF

what rationale exactly?

That's the whole point - they haven't been able to come up with anything other than 'we don't think it's ethical' - but can't tell you why.

'we will charge passengers on connecting flights a reasonable price compared to gouging pax on individual segments' is not a reason.

drsmithy

There's a thing called reasonable expectations.

Arbitrary rules fail them. A rule requiring me to fly with red underwear on or pay twice as much would be treated with the similar contempt it deserves.

Not if you're making an argument one service is not a subset of the other it's not !

If a plane is flying from A to B to C, regardless of whether a passenger has bought a ticket from A to B, or A to C, then clearly the flight from A to B is a subset of the flight from A to C.

I've agreed to pay for a seat on a plane from point A to point C. If I don't occupy that seat for the entire journey, that's nobody's business except mine.

It would be interesting to know how many of the "ethical warriors" in this thread would be happy to buy an obvious mistake fare (say, priced at $150 instead of $1500), then get all high and mighty if the airline cancelled their purchase after discovering the error. My guess is: most.

nsx

You and I may not like it, but their rationale is that they want to charge whatever the market may bear for AAA-BBB even if that price is higher that what the market will bear for AAA-CCC (possibly via BBB). Since this is a free market (prices are no longer decreed by the Civil Aeronautics Board) the airlines have that pricing freedom.

If the government regulated prices, I would expect that the AAA-CCC price would increase but the AAA-BBB price would not decrease. It's ironic that hidden city users take advantage of the price benefits of deregulation while they decry the fact that the AAA-BBB price is so high relative to the hypercompetitive AAA-CCC pricing.

Mike Jacoubowsky

How is it any different from pricing seats depending upon time of day or date purchased, such that the six people sitting in the same row all may have paid widely-different prices for the exact same product, but through fortune or misfortune happened to buy at the right or wrong time? I'm not talking about walk-up vs months in advance, but wide variability in the 60-90 days out range, none of which has anything to do with supply & demand but rather some weird scheme to maximize airline revenue.

If you can make the leap of faith such that seat cost isn't driving you mad, why are hidden city issues so tough to rationalize? From your perspective or the airlines?

It's an irrational system, from a passenger's perspective. From the airline's perspective, it works. The passengers aren't going to change anything, not as long as the business model is based upon profit and this structure is clearly profitable. Someday, you might see an alternative, an airline willing to buy you from somebody else by offering you a lower fare in some manner or other. But that's not today. Nothing is going to change for a while.

drsmithy

I understand the airlines' position perfectly. They want to use arbitrary pricing discrimination and imposing, threatening legalese to try and milk as much money out of their customers as possible.

Pretty standard business practice, especially for big companies with comically opaque pricing structures and significant market power.

However, there is no fraud going on here. Certainly not in any sense that the typical punter would conceive it. The airline has all the vital information in the transaction to assess whether or not it is at fair value, the customer essentially zero. The one piece of information they do have - the price of a slightly different service that achieves the same end result - leads only to a conclusion of price gouging. The customer is reacting to the information asymmetry in a perfectly rational and quite ethical way.

sethb

No, for tax accounting purposes I don't have a loss because I never booked the profit (see my other example).

sethb

How about this happening:

You buy a ticket AAA-BBB-CCC. You get on the first segment, then BBB gets socked in by weather, and the flight diverts to CCC. The airline tells you you're done, it has real passengers it has to re-route to their destinations. How successful do you think you're going to be demanding that they fly you to BBB then back to CCC? (You can probably get mileage credit for the ticket as purchased, but that's a separate example.)

nsx

IROPS routing to CCC is a known risk of hidden city ticketing. You always need to be prepared to buy a ticket for CCC-BBB or AAA-BBB if you bailed out before departure.

drsmithy

Right.

So, as mentioned, you haven't actually lost anything, you just haven't made as much as you thought you might have.

It's a bit like someone who puts notches on the bedpost for the women he says he could have taken home from the bar, but didn't.

drsmithy

Probably not very. I don't have any disagreement with that example at all.

jrl767

we can have an ethics debate, or we can have an economics debate ... it gets really difficult to stay on the flight plan when an aspect of either gets introduced into the conversation about the other

imo the ethics are pretty clear, at least in a simplistic and literal interpretation of what an airline ticket represents: it's not exactly ethical, for the sole purpose of paying less, to buy a ticket that one has no intention of using ... that said, I freely admit to having done it on an occasional basis on various airlines since 1976, and I have never slept any the worse at night for doing so

the economics side of the question is much fuzzier, though, because the airlines' opaque and seemingly illogical -- at least to some -- pricing structures are probably what have driven people to use hidden-city ticketing ... I suspect that many if not most people are fundamentally motivated to minimize their cash/credit outlays, and that in many if not most cases their risk/reward assessments regarding unethical behavior come down very heavily on the reward side

however, when the risk turns to reality (e.g., the individual winds up at the ticketed destination as a result of IROPS, or the airline comes after the individual or their FF account), I also suspect that at least some of these people seldom acknowledge that the situation is a direct consequence of the action that they probably knew was iffy in the first place

pinniped

I've seen that AA letter before: I think it's intended mainly for travel agents who enable hidden-city or throwaway ticket repeat offenders.

That's rich that AA is unilaterally declaring hidden-city unethical. The entire reason it exists is because of anticompetitive practices by airlines at their fortress hubs, with the particular example they used (AUS vs. DFW) enabled by AA, through its political cronies, by preventing other airlines from fully competing in the Dallas area.

Cute that they throw LAX into their example. There's probably nowhere in the world from which a passenger would book AUS as a hidden-city to get to LAX. That example is 100% about AA and Texas politics, nothing more, nothing less.

Tchiowa

There is also something called detrimental reliance.

But this rule is very clear. You buy a ticket A to B to C and you weren't aware of the B to C leg?

But you didn't agree to a subset, did you?


It's not arbitrary. It's marketing and load management. Do I understand it all? No, and I'd say most don't. But if you think the airlines are simply sitting around at a table drinking and saying "How about $400 from A to B?" you're mistaken.

nsx

That's part of the reason, but it doesn't explain how a customer could ever benefit from hidden city tickets on Southwest, which has no fortress hubs.

Sometimes the market price from AAA to CCC is lower than the market price from AAA to BBB for other reasons. The advantage of market pricing is that you don't need to know the reasons, and nobody really knows the whole story. You only need to know the price to make your decision to buy or sell.

FWIW, I agree that it's unethical of airlines to mark up their monopoly route prices, especially if other carriers do not have any reasonable way to enter that market.

pinniped

I'd *almost* bet the house that you can't benefit from hidden city on WN to the same extent that you can on the legacies. The order of magnitude is much, much less.

I don't know the intricacies of WN's pricing model, but if MCI-DAL was ever pricing at $497, there would be no point beyond DAL that I could book at $95. Perhaps an extreme example going all the way back to the OP, but the main reason is that for Southwest to have a $497 fare, it's probably due to real demand. (i.e., that flight is sold out except for AT/BS fares.) For DL to have a $497 fare to DTW, that plane could still be rather empty and selling $95 seats to GRR or whatever.

Southwest has fewer monopoly routes and less "weirdness" in their pricing model. Therefore fewer opportunities for a wildly lucrative repeat hidden-city strategy. But I'll concede a few could be out there somewhere...