I´m checking air fare prices for a trip to Thailand, and what a whooping surprise when I find that a round trip from Montevideo (United) to LAX goes for 850 and the one way ticket goes for 2221. I mean, what kind of scheme is this??? :dubious:
Really, I´m baffled, what kind of explanation could be behind this, I´d understand a price above 50% of a round trip for the one way ticket, maybe a 60 or 70% at most, but not a 261-plus-change%!.
By the way the leg from LAX to BKK is priced at 350 one way and 625 round trip by China Airlines.
I’m a Corporate travel manager. I’ve been doing this for… well, for a dang long time.
I know of what you speak.
I can give you all sorts of reasons WHY the airlines price seats in this manner and HOW they justify it. But after about ninety seconds you’ll get a glazed look in your eyes and my words would blur into some undecipherable mess of alphanumerics.
The Travel Industry - resident in the Twilight Zone since, well, probably as long as it’s existed. Ale - believe it or not, that’s actually a pretty common scenario, and far from the weirdest one. You shoulda taken the blue pill!
Air fares have always been nutty. Travel/tourism people have noted that on the average flight, probably no two people paid the same price for their ticket.
Don’t look for reasons.
Sometimes there are reasons, however, such as lower prices to encourage traffic on less-used routes and vice versa.
I recall years ago that legislators from Buffalo, NY used to gripe that their fare to Albany ran around $300+ while they could fly to Miami for $95. This seems to violate the dictum in the above paragraph, as one might expect more people would want to go to Miami from Buffalo than to Albany, but who knows? As I said, “nutty.”
I’m on a watchlist somewhere since I’ve bought tickets for Miami ($95) and gotten off in Atlanta (my actual destination) and tossed the rest of the ticket. The fare from NY to ATL might have been $300 or so and the Miami flight had an Atlanta stopover so I followed my budget instead of the rules.
My dad used to fly places on business for just a day or two, where the cost of a round-trip ticket for a whole week was far cheaper. His office used to book week round-trips, but schedule them so that the outbound ticket of one and the return of another were a day apart.
It also meant that he’d sometimes fly out under one name and back on another, which lead to some funny moments if he met anyone. I think you’d have a harder time pulling that off in if you were in the 'states these days.
I was booking some travel for my family for this summer, and, for a reason too long to explain, had to book my wife a round trip flight from Dallas to New York City (1373 miles each way) and then a one way flight from NY, NY to Albany, NY (138 miles). The round trip ticket covering over 2700 miles was a few hundred dollars less than the flight covering 138 miles. I ended up just booking the NYC/Dallas flight and then a ticket on Amtrack for the Albany leg. The Amtrack ticket was about $57 for a “Business class” ticket.
Anyone have any idea how long and how expensive a cab ride from LaGuardia to Penn station will be?
People who would go to a factory Monday through Friday would do something similar - buy tickets to make it look like they had a Saturday stayover, which was a lot cheaper. I believe airlines now look for this kind of thing, and are just outraged that you have the nerve to try and get around their sensible policies. :rolleyes: I’m sure GrizzRich has lots of examples.
When we moved to California, we bought round trips with the return leg a long way in the future. My wife and kids used their’s but I never used mine - and it was a lot cheaper. Now we found that round trips with over a month stayover were a lot more expensive than under a month - on United at least.
Southwest is the airline with rational fares - RT is 2X 1 way, there are three or four options, and it is all out there on their website. Doesn’t help much on international travel, though.
This is sort of a WAG as I’m not a Travel Guru ™, but don’t they jack up the cost for those 1-way flights so they can discourage people from buying 1-way tickets? If they sell a 1-way ticket, then they have an empty seat for the return flight that they have to try to fill, right?
I thought about it, but it makes less sense in the end, with such a huge price disparity the sensible thing for the consumer it to pay the round trip ticket and cancell the second flight, so they had you booked and a seat was waiting for you but now they have an empty seat and maybe not enough time for someone else to buy it.
Why, it’s simple really. A team of airline actuaries analyzes the habits of different kinds of travelers, the cost of their flights, market competition, predicted weather patterns and fuel prices, seasonal demand variations, and several other factors. Then, for each flight, they divide up the number of seasons into sets of buckets, denoted by a single-letter booking code that identifies a broad class of fare (e.g., full-fare first, deep discount economy, etc.). There’s maybe ~20 or so per flight. Then, they come up with sets of fare restrictions designed to match the habits of a certain kind of traveller, e.g., “round trip, 4 night minimum stay, booked 3 weeks in advance” for a vacationing family, “one-way, booked soon before the flight” for a business traveller with an unpredictable schedule, etc. Then, they combine those fare restrictions with a booking code and an actual fare and denote the combination with a fare basis code, which is an alphanumeric string that typically begins with the booking code. Additionally, they come up with discounts that can be applied to the fare basis code and identify such kinds of discounts with a ticket designator. Then, they take all that information and publish it in various filings with ATPCO, along with restrictions on who can view the various filings (e.g., some fares might be restricted to a certain booking agency). When a system (like ITA or Sabre) prices an itinerary, they find out which fare basis code(s) it qualifies for according to the corresponding fare restrictions, adds any applicable tarrifs, taxes, and facility fees, and viola, you have a fare.
That’s how legacy airline pricing works in a nutshell. Nothing to it, really.
Because then customers might be able to use a close substitute like sheep entrails to figure out the pricing structure and game it their advantage. Duh!
That doesn’t make sense as long as people get return flights over different periods. Once you’ve filled up a plane with people going from Minnesota to Houston, you don’t have all those same people going from Houston back to Minnesota at the same time. (Heck, some of those people probably live in Houston and are on the return leg of their trips!)
They’re in the business of taking empty seats on airplanes and selling them. It’s a complicated business, but encouraging people to take round trips doesn’t really simplify the problem any as far as I can see.
