stifle

Again, you're presupposing that a service which takes "longer" or goes "further" is therefore worth "more" than a subset of that service, rather than them being two different products that just happen to share a component.

BearX220

You're incredibly off base, and I can't tell if you're being deliberately obtuse or genuinely don't understand pricing strategy.

There's nothing "arbitrary" or "discriminatory" about airfares. They are a product of supply/demand analysis, the impact of competition, the cost of serving a given station, etc. Whether you like or accept them or not, there are good, rational reasons why it costs more, as a rule, to fly New York-Rapid City than New York-Los Angeles.

If there were such a thing as a JFK-RAP-LAX flight, it would not be ethical or proper in any way to buy JFK-SFO and get off in RAP.

This is not a defense of big anti-customer corporations. It's a defense of free market-set, city-pair pricing. Which is not, by the way, "opaque" most of the time.

Presumably, if you had your way, air travel would be priced like a ride in a metered Yellow Cab -- at a flat 10 cents per mile or something. Which would make even less sense than the system we have.

sethb

That was obviously a joke, but I have seen things like it at restaurants.

One sandwich shop had different prices for swiss cheese and avocado sandwich, swiss cheese sandwich with added avocado, and avocado sandwich with added swiss cheese. Is it unethical to order that sandwich whichever way was cheapest?

sethb

They are completely arbitrary; the airline makes them up as it pleases.

It certainly wouldn't be effective.

I take it you haven't been in a metered cab this century.

drsmithy

No, I'm really, really not. The "value" and even "cost" of the two services are irrelevant.

I am only assuming that the delivery of subset A-B of something (and whether it is a product or a service is irrelevant) is inherently done as part of delivery of A-B-C.

Hence the reason I agree that if someone had purchased a ticket A-[B]-C, and (after takeoff) some situation prevents the stop at B occurring (say, bad weather), then that person has no grounds to demand carriage back to B, after arriving at C.

drsmithy

I understand it fine.

I just don't have any problem with taking advantage of it when it benefits me more than it benefits the vendor. Because I know the vendor sure as hell doesn't have a problem with using it to benefit me more than them.

Amongst which, I imagine, is the cost involved in flying all the way across the USA instead of halfway...

It's completely ethical to buy anything a vendor offers and use it in the way that maximises your benefit without causing harm or loss to the vendor.

A copyright holder can dictate that I might only consume their product (or service, if you want to talk, say, streaming) in a particular geographic region. They even try to enforce this at a mechanical level with DVD regions and the like (this is another example of discriminatory pricing). However, there is zero ethical problem with me taking a DVD I own on an overseas holiday and watching it there, or buying it from another country and bypassing the region locking locally, or using a VPN to circumvent geoblocking.

Hate to break it to you, but the "free market" includes customers using products the way vendors would prefer them not to.

Not in the slightest. Airlines are free to price their flights in any silly way they choose and I, as a customer, am free to consume them in any way I want.

Tchiowa

^^

^^

But isn't it up to the vendor to decide whether or not he has been harmed, not you? If a vendor is forced to adopt a price structure that is very low profit on a certain route because of competition and makes it up on other routes that is not silly pricing and, by definition, you are harming the vendor if you buy one and consume the other.

Only within the confines of the agreement you make with them when you agree to procure the product or service. In order to use Hidden City Ticketing, by definition you must lie to the vendor about your intentions.

drsmithy

Actually if it's anyone, it's a judge.

Vendors will make up any ridiculous story about harm they want, just witness the posts in this thread about how a customer who really, truly, was going to buy everything in the store being hit by a car is a "loss", or similar.

Uh huh. How would that be different to a customer "forced" to use hidden city ticketing to afford a flight they otherwise wouldn't be able to make because it cost too much ?

Hilarious that people buying a ticket sold by an airline are ethical black holes because they bought them and got off early, but the airline screwing customers elsewhere with high prices so they can remain competitive is apparently, ethically, A-OK.

If a vendor has decided that they can afford to sell a ticket for a given trip then, by definition, buying that ticket is not causing them harm.

If the vendor wants to *self* "harm", by selling their product at a lower profit, well, that's not the customer's problem.

And if they had a similar silly regulation about having to wear red underwear to fly, or if it was an entertainment company trying to tell me I couldn't watch their DVDs in another country, I would have zero qualms about "lying" to them, either.

LondonElite

Wow, I now really know what Bill Murray must have felt like...

This just keeps going around in circles, doesn't it? An airline is free to charge what it wants. You're lucky/fortunate that it happens to stop along the way where you want to get off (but which you didn't pay for).

It would be interesting for there to be 'revenue protection officers' to be at the top of the gate at the intermediate destination with credit card machines happily taking an additional charge for those who paid for A-C but decide to get off in B.

BearX220

Yup. 850 posts and we have not budged from the line of scrimmage.

Imagine the howls of self-righteous outrage from the many who imagine they have an inherent right to ignore the terms of their deal with the airline, but become upset when the airline seeks to enforce them.

Mike Jacoubowsky

A reminder that 90%+ of the posts have nothing to do with the question originally asked. It was an interesting question. How much do the airlines care, how often have they cracked down on it, etc.

The ethical implications of violating the COC are fine, but what if somebody actually wanted to know what would happen, as far as their travel goes, if they went too far? Relevant info is deeply buried in this thread and very tough to find. Perhaps it needs a wiki?

s0ssos

Imagine the howls of rage when people find out that an airline has cancelled their seat. Oh, and they realize the actual terms don't say the airline has to fly them at a given time or a given date. Or that they could spend all day sitting in a plane on the runway and not move.
Let's see. Did the airlines make those policies? Or did someone else make it so some of those practices are now illegal (well, at least fine-able. Illegal makes it sound like people would go to jail for something. Corporations and people working for them never seem to go to jail).

drsmithy

That would depend on the terms that were being ignored.

There is a vast, vast gulf of difference between getting off a plane early and (say) not being able to get on your plane at all because the airline overbooked your seat.

Heck, even a last-minute aircraft type substitution has more of a negative impact on the passenger, and you rarely hear people complain about that.

Tchiowa

There is a vast, vast gulf of difference between murder and shoplifting. Ethical people don't do either.

drsmithy

Perhaps if there were anything under discussion vaguely resembling either of those two alternatives, you might have a point.