Originally Posted by
snaxmuppet
With an airline there is a clear disadvantage to buying a ticket with more sectors to get to your destination and so the direct route has a premium value to those that want to pay for it.
Imagine two routes... A-B and A-C. They are priced the same. There are the direct, and more convenient, more popular and so more expensive, routings A-B and A-C. They can command a premium price as it is the most convenient and quickest routings. However, lets assume that the route A-C is always booked out but there is spare capacity on A-B and also B-C. The airline would like to utilise that spare capacity on A-B and B-c so they offer those travelling A-C to route via B so A-B-C. Now we have the situation where it is cheaper to fly A-B-C then the direct route A-C. Also, as A-B and A-C are the same price it is also cheaper than the direct route A-B. The only purpose behind the A-B-C routing is to use spare capacity on B-C. If I take that A-B-C routing and drop the B-C then I have actually flown the direct, and so more expensive route A-B when I paid for a cheaper A-B-C totally negating the purpose, from the airline's perspective of the A-B-C routing in the first place.
Dropping the last sector then means you have flown a direct route A-B and so you should have paid for the direct, convenient, more expensive A-B route instead of the cheaper, multi-sector, A-B-C.
This then is the crux of the matter for me. There is an assumption made when an airline sells us a ticket... that is that we want to go to where we have bought the ticket to. The pricing of all tickets makes that assumption it seems to me and so the rules of supply and demand can then be used to price accordingly. If we try to deceive the airline as to where we want to end up then they lose the opportunity to sell the more direct routes at a premium price. I think we all agree that the direct routes should command a premium price but it all crumbles into a bag of chalk if we tell the airline we want to go somewhere but actually travel to somewhere else.
Yes, this is what the airlines want, but why should we care? We are not here to help the airlines price fares correctly or to balance their supply and demand. If they can play the game, so should we. When we buy a ticket, we do not owe "honesty" of our travel intentions to anyone.
Make no mistake - airlines are profit maximizing entities and they are big enough to worry about themselves. It completely riles me up that they are suing customers who have found a smart and legitimate way -- completely fair game in a liberal market-based economy -- around their pricing strategy. Every pricing strategy has its weakness. They should accept this, or change their pricing strategy instead of suing their customers. I'm someone who has not dropped the last segment of my itineraries before and do not plan to do so, but I am just mad at the behaviour of the airlines in this respect.