Originally Posted by shoreline

But, honestly, "price matching" may not be in their best interest (from a business stand point).

It causes high frustration and makes people, like myself, who fly weekly start to wonder and compare other values with benefits of other carriers. In the past several months WN seems to have been having a terrible problem with flight cancellations. So business travellers can find themselves in a quite a bind.

For me, I've learned to work around it. However, with the price hikes, I am beginning to wonder why I am 'working around' their company issues.

There have been weeks where I have spent hours and hours (like up to 8 hrs) waiting to get on another flight, or taxing on the runway only to return back to the gate for maintenance back out and back to the gate again to be unloaded because the problem was not fixed. Obviously, the wait for a replacement flight or plan can be extremely lengthy.

Other than placing us on another flight several hours late, no mention of compensation for 'their company' issues. (I understand other airlines may have the same issues, but I am wondering to what extent).

Enough venting from me. I know you understand. I'm just curious how many weekly or mutliple weekly fliers they will lose with a 'mere price match' (especially if all the maintenance issues and cancelled flights continue).

For me, I am keeping my options open. I am investigating airlines now and may start trying other airlines if this route continues at the beginning of the year.

Originally Posted by busybryan

***Disclaimer Unethical Hypothetical Situation. If someone was to purchase refundable tickets for say 8 people for a certain flight. Say you got 3 friends to purchase an additional 8 seats a piece for the same flight. So now you and your 3 friends essentially control 32 seats on a given flight.. say 12 hours before the flight you simultaneously cancel all 32 seats. I imagine this would affect the airlines complicated pricing structure and several seats would become very cheap at which time you simply buy 4 tickets for your trip. 1) Is this plausible? 2) I understand its very unethical because it could end up costing the airline several thousand dollars. 3) Has this ever been done before?.......I know tactics like hidden city fares upset airlines but I imagine that something like price manipulation would be illegal is there any literature or articles about this topic?