OMG!!!
Not row 10!
I’m not sure how anyone can bear this. I mean, in row 11 you probably get off the plane at least a minute and a half later than the people in row 1.
Consider this scenario:
Flight 987 flies every day from the local airport. It’s February 1, and I have a reservation for Flight 987 on February 3, but in my drunken stupor I believe my reservation is for Flight 987 on February 2. Suppose I am permitted to check in 48 hours in advance of departure. So on February 1 I check in for my February 3 flight, and then on February 2 I go to the airport, where I am denied boarding for Flight 987 that day because my ticket says my departure is on February 3.
With check-in limited to no more than 24 hours before departure, this sort of mistake becomes very unlikely. I don’t know that this was an intent of the policy, but any policy that reduces the unhappiness of customers (even if that unhappiness would have been by their own drunken hand) is worth considering.
If this is true in the airline industry, then we the consumers must share a considerable burden of the blame.
Take checked baggage fees. Many people hate them, and complain about them. Many people fly Southwest specifically to avoid them.
And yet, on one level, checked baggage fees are a perfectly sensible and reasonable policy. Why shouldn’t someone who checks a bag, which requires extra labor on the part of the airline, extra space in the bottom of the plane, and a sophisticated system of barcodes and tracking, pay more than someone who drags an overnight bag onto the plane?
Not only that, but the ticket-buying public has made quite clear, over a relatively extended period of time, that their main criterion when shopping for airlines tickets is pricepricepricepriceprice. People complain about cramped seating and the lack of service and the disappearance of free in-flight food and the nickel-and-dime charges for stuff like wifi access, but, with the exception of rich people and business travelers, most airline customers choose their tickets based on the cheapest seat available.
When the public makes clear that the cheapest ticket price is the one that gets them to click “Buy” on the website, airlines are just acting rationally when they make every effort to reduce up-front ticket prices. And one of the ways to do this is to take all of the little things that used to be free–bag check, snacks, seat selection, etc., etc.–and parcel them out as paid, optional extras.
My thoughts exactly.
To be clear … “a la carte” pricing is about unbundling what used to be a basket of goods and pricing all the components separately. So a customer can buy and pay for whichever components of the old bundle they want, while not buying or paying for the ones they don’t want.
This is fairly uncontroversial, but a lot of folks think it’s a form of stealth price rise, where the most commonly bought set of a la carte items just *happens * (imagine that!) to cost more than the old bundle did while leaving off all the nice frills.
A different phenomenon is “personalized pricing” which amounts to charging different customers different amounts for the exact same product just based on their differing willingness to pay.
Amazon has gotten in trouble for experimenting with this idea a lot. For awhile they famously charged a higher price on every product to anyone using an Apple browser on the assumption they were richer and so less price sensitive. This was *very *controversial when they got caught at it. Expect this to be a growing feature of modern life whatever you’re buying. And consumers are almost defenseless against this.
Some industries like the airlines have a different issue and that’s the perishable nature of the product. So in effect there’s a continuous auction where the airline is trying to sell each seat to the highest bidder, but both sides know there’s a clock ticking and any unsold product will be either dumped on the market at giveaway prices at the end, or else go unsold and end up in the trash. This is commonly called “dynamic pricing”.
Within reason it’s not too controversial, but there are always horror stories at each end of the spectrum.
There is also the game-theoretic nature of the dynamic pricing process: If it gets down to departure time and there are still unsold seats, it’d be best to sell them for a pittance as long as that’s above your marginal cost of producing & selling it. But if you do that more than once, you’ll be training your customers that they can wait to the end and get giveaway prices. The more the customers wait, the more unsold last-minute inventory the seller will have.
Just like Kohl’s has trained me to never, and I do mean never, buy anything there unless it’s 50% or more off AND I have a 30% coupon, not just one of the 15% cheapie rip-off coupons. Their short-term sales-boosting strategy has turned into their worst long-term margin-killing nightmare.
I almost always have at least one (oversize and overweight) checked bag. But I am almost always flying for business so I get reimbursed for the fees.