Originally Posted by
OttoMH
I think some of the issue is because you choose the lowest fare bucket for your desired service class.. if the airline then releases cheaper buckets after previously saying that they were unavailable.. you feel a bit ripped off.
Prices go up? Yes. But you are the customer after all
I don't think that being the customer affords us very much in the airline industry in this age
But to be honest, this is not really different from any other industry. You buy a great jumper and two weeks later, it might well be on sale, you buy the 'best available seats' at the opera, but two weeks later, some other better located seats appear on sale because some customers cancelled their tickets or some 'free tickets' officials announced that they would not come etc. I guess this is just a question of 'visualising' modern day seats - the plane does not have a fixed number of seats from each fare bucket and indeed all these seats are exactly the same when you travel. Instead, the plane is just a 'target' (as a full plane) and the airline will 'correct' the map of the plane every day to make the 'final' image of the plane resemble the target as closely as possible while maximising its revenue. In this sense, buying a ticket at a certain point is time is just like a bet that this is the best time to buy. If you are lucky and your bet is good, the price will go up and when your friends tell you that they have paid 3 times what you did for a seat exactly like yours, you'll feel very happy. If, on the other hand, your bet is wrong - which it would have been this time had you bought your ticket first time round - you'll end up virtually losing money. You may then feel ripped off, but you have just been beaten by the system. The extreme version of this betting game is played by low cost carriers. Looking at ticket prices etc, it is absolutely impossible to know how prices will evolve in the last 24 hours before a flight takes place. If an Easyjet single is on sale for £100 three days before a flight, 48 hours later, it might cost £250 or £25. You may decide to take the risk and wait or play it safe and buy, but there is no question of being ripped off here, it is just a game between you and the machine, and as with all betting games, the machine wins more often than the customer at the end, which is what makes the system sustainable...