LondonElite

A good thought experiment, but I think it suffers from the good vs service problem.

drsmithy

Maybe if you paid the full price and were then refunded the difference after you got off at C, it would be marginally more applicable.

drsmithy

Not when it's the same plane all the way through it's not.

It's just arbitrary, discriminatory pricing.

The people tying themselves in knots trying to explain why, when a plane flies A-B-C, that the A-B leg is not a subset of the entire trip, are hilarious.

You're not "breaking the rules", you're taking a completely different product.

A better analogy would be if you bought a bottle of lemonade (A-B), you got a free cup (B-C).

Compared to your analogy ? It's completely different.

drsmithy

Please, tell me more about how paying a masseuse the agreed rate for two hours is "wasting their time".

It's completely imaginary money.

Now, when a masseuse tracks their customers' behaviour over time, and figures out what percentage tend to leave at the 90-minute mark of a two-hour massage, and starts (over-)booking additional 30-minute customers into that "empty" half hour slot, that's when the imaginary money starts to become real. But, of course, sometimes they'll get it wrong and piss off some 30-minute customers getting squeezed into those _potential_ openings who subsequeuntly stop coming. That's still an imaginary loss, but it's certainly more real than the 30-minute gap someone leaving early creates that has nothing whatsoever booked into it.

BearX220

There you go again with the irrelevant volume-based analogies. Air travel is not sold by volume.

It's more like: buy a bottle of Franzia, pilfer a bottle of Veuve Cliquot for the Franzia price.

stifle

You've started by declaring that your false premise is true. Flying from A-B, A-C, and B-C are different products, which is my precise point.

angatol

.....

stifle

That doesn't help people who can't afford to pay the "maximum cost" upfront.

CDKing

Analogies rarely if ever work on FT. Why people bother, i don't know.

sethb

And lose all the business to an airline that doesn't do that.

84fiero

They should be added to a list such as this one

drsmithy

It has zero to do with volume.

It's one product (lemonade with a cup) where a subset of that product (the lemonade) is all the customer wants.

No, it's not, because those are two complete different products, and the bottle of Veuve costs the the vendor more than the bottle of Franzia to put on the shelf.

If your example used a bottle of Veuve, and a cleanskin (unlabelled/unbranded, if that's not a term you're familiar with) bottle of champagne that had Veuve in it, you'd have something more accurate.

drsmithy

No, they're not. They're arbitrary discriminatory pricing.

Different products are things that are actually different. We are - unless I have grossly misunderstood what hidden city ticketing is - talking about the same plane flying from A to B, then continuing on to C.

Any analogy trying to suggest these things are as different as, say, two different brands of champagne, is simply absurd because of that fundamental inaccuracy (as are the outrageous comparisons to theft when no actual loss occurs). The cognitive dissonance of people trying to argue they are somehow even similar, all to defend a massive corporation's ridiculously opaque pricing model, is staggering.

drsmithy

Some people use analogies to illuminate and educate.

Others use them to obfuscate and confuse.

nsx

To make the analogy even passably accurate you need to find a situation in which the second part of the product has NEGATIVE MARKET VALUE when added to the first part even if it would have positive market value alone.

A bar charges $6 for vodka, but only $3 for vodka with castor oil. With your best Jack Nicholson grin you order the latter and ask them to hold the castor oil.