One-way ticket trickery (Roundtrip questions)

asymmetric?

My company spends approximately $300 million per year on travel, so they have a different take on that.

well in Hong Kong you can be fined if you dont eat all your noodles

http://www.newscientist.com/blog/environment/2007/04/costly-leftovers.html

OK. This is starting to make a little sense. I don’t travel on business much, and have never had the “I gotta be in LA tomorrow” situation come up.

So. I suppose that a business traveler that MUST be somewhere ‘tomorrow’ can’t just buy a round trip ticket because not as many are available. I suppose that they could buy a round trip ticket with a later return date and then just throw out the second half. And do it again on the return.

The tickets I priced that had the one way ticket more expensive than the round trip ticket was for May 31. A week and a half away. Not exactly short notice, but less time than the average leisure traveler would do. Let’s try again……

Denver to Pittsburgh. August 30. Direct flights, non-stop. One carrier. Leave anytime.

Round trip, returning the next day. $300

One way, no return. $158

That works.

What I see is that the costs are spread more heavily for business travel. And that cost gets spread to every one that might do business. Reserving lower costs for leisure travel.

Huh. Kind of interesting. A way to spread travel costs across to everyone (or most everyone).

And a way for leisure travelers to get a better price. Though we know we all pay for this in one way or another.

:stuck_out_tongue: :wink:

I’ll point out that I’ve recently missed connections all too often. In such cases, my luggage still made the flight. There’s no effort for security to prevent luggage from going on. Sure, the airline knows my feeder flight arrived late, but if they really cared about security, they’d know that potential belligerents (don’t wanna say terrorists) could just as easily schedule close connections until they missed one. These days, the odds would be in the belligerents’ favor.

I only point that out to dispel the airlines’ security concerns vis a vis skipping continuing legs.

To get things straight, I wanted to buy a return ticked from A to B to A and use the B to A portion because it’s cheaper.
But I can understand what the airlines are doing with their pricing changes. They change their prices based on demand. More importantly, they probably have measurements as to how the elasticity in demand is. If people HAVE to fly on a certain day, they are much more willing to rise prices knowing that people have no other option but to pay. Fair enough, They fund their business however they have to. They may loose money on domestic flights for that reason. Who knows how it works. It’s a very high-tech way of measuring the marketplace. But honestly, in the end, I don’t see how it’s not price-gouging. Price gouging is raising the prices as high as possible when you can to take advantage of the situation. This is essentiall what airlines do on a day-to-day basis. Is there any reason why flying in July costs more than in March? No, probably not, but the amount of people wanting to fly then is higher. But what they have is a system that maximizes prices according to demand based over a period of time. If it were impossible to buy tickets ahead of time you’d simply pay the market price, but the problem is that you buy ahead of time. They have metrics, I’m sure which allow for the price to be lowered closer to traveling time in order to sell the final seats. They can probably sell all the seats if they go low enough, and why not? It’s not like they’ll save any money by having an empty plane. Whatever. They have advanced methods of determining demand that allow them to make precise adjustments to the prices in order to make money.

I don’t fly a lot. And often wonder about all the people that miss connections or have their baggage lost.

I would like to give a bit of advice. Fly early. 7-10 am flights. Even if it means getting up at 3am and drive 2 hours to the airport.

I cannot imagine a situation where you’d be able to do that with one ticket.

Uh, “missed connections” means the airline screwed me, not that I don’t know how to arrive at an airport! That would be “missed flight.”

Being a guy, I don’t mind my baggage occasionally being delayed. It was $300 profitable on my last trip to Mexico. My wife and niece, though, made a big show of missing all of their girly stuff they didn’t have the foresight to carry on. :smiley:

If I miss a connection, it means the plane getting me to the airport in time for the next one, didn’t. So far at least, I have never missed a flight because I didn’t get to the airport on time for any reason I could control. My luggage went to Houston instead of San Antonio because the luggage people didn’t get it and change it to my new flight, even after getting the description and number from the agent as I stood there. The interesting part was, coming back, I barely made my connection in Pittsburg, reaching my flight about 5 minutes before they closed the doors. When I got to Ft. Wayne, IN, my luggage didn’t show up on the turntable. I checked and it had came in on the flight the hour before. :dubious:

I’ll give enipla a little bit of credit though: familiarity breeds contempt. I’m not such a frequent flier that I accumulate millions of miles, but I fly somewhat regularly. Although I’ve never missed a flight, my familiarity with the two airports I use most often leads me to pushing the limits at times, beause I know how long it really takes to…
[ul]
[li]Park and get a shuttle.[/li][li]Get through the line to get boarding passes and check luggage.[/li][li]Get through security[/li][li]Walk through the terminal and make my flight.[/li][/ul]
Less savvy travellers always heed the advice about showing up x hours before scheduled departure (totally unnecessary) and all of that nonsense. I still only sit bored waiting to get on. Yeah, I may screw up one day and miss a flight, and I can see how other experienced travellers might just push their luck too far one day, but I can see why enipla would be overly cautious (and urge cautiousness to others).

If you travel frequently the optimum strategy will require you to miss the occasional flight. You trade the extremely rare three or four hour wait for the next flight for the benefit of saving 15 minutes with every trip to the airport. To me, bragging about never missing a flight means you’re wasting more time waiting at airports, it’s just in smaller increments.

But to get back to the round trip strategies, I once had to make repeated round trips to the same city for a long term project, out on Monday and back on Friday. With no Saturday stayover it would have been pretty expensive. I bought one round trip with the return four months down the road, and from then on bought round trip tickets to my home city on Friday and out on Monday, with the Saturday stayover it saved thousands of dollars, and I used the final return ticket at the project’s completion.

This is called interleaving tickets, and the airlines don’t like it, and can give you a hard time about collecting your miles, but it’s not against the fare rules, or it wasn’t at the time.

Speaking of staying over Saturdays, back in the 90’s it used to be economical for some flights to buy 2 sets of round trips, and throw both return tickets away. So if you wanted to fly Boston to Phoenix on Monday and return Thursday, it was cheaper to buy a round trip Boston to Phoenix Monday to Monday, and a round trip Phoenix to Boston Thursday to Thursday. The airlines eventually caught on.

And in enipla’s defense, if you start your travelling day as early as possible, you’re more likely to make your connection simply because there’s less time for delays to accumulate, and the first flight of the day for a plane is the one most likely to leave and arrive on time. Or so I’ve read.

Yeah, missed connections is not really what I meant. Though I do think that the earlier you travel in the day, there is less likely to be a problem with the system in general. That’s what I was trying to say.

One would think that a NY to LAX to NY roundtrip would cost the same as a LAX to NY to LAX one - assuming same time of day, same time of year, etc. In other words, round trip travel between two cities would be priced the same, no matter which one you started from.

Or so I would think - but I’m open to learning that fares are even more bizarre than I imagined.

We always do this when booking tickets for my in-laws to fly from Philly to SFO and back. Also, we get a non-stop. It has saved us a lot of grief.

I for one am always early. I’d much rather spend a half hour reading in the terminal than get stressed out worrying about making a flight. It’s not the time, it’s the quality of the time.

Actually, the plane has to travel farther going from LA to NY. Rotation of the earth has an effect when traveling that far, so it takes longer.

What? I could see if the plane were an ICBM I could see that having an effect.

I notice that travelling from NYC to LAX generally takes 30 minutes longer than from LAX to NYC.

What is the nature of this effect the rotation of the Earth has?

Actually LA to NY should be able to be faster if they can catch the Jet Stream.

Is this a whoosh? Even if the rotation mattered (which it doesn’t - the atmosphere rotates with the Earth, and the plane flies through the atmosphere), there are still 2 flights going on - one from NY to LA, one from LA to NY. The price of a round trip ticket should be the same regardless of what order you took them in.

The other interesting thing is the “stay-over-the-weekend” discount. It works like this:
Fly a trip Sunday or Monday with a return on Thursday or Friday and you will pay approximately 50% more than a trip that flies out Thursday or Friday and returns Sunday or Monday.
I used this to great advantage when I was aero-commuting between Texas and Georgia for 9 months. I bought a 1-way to Georgia, then bought round-trip tickets that made it appear I was staying over the weekend in Texas (which, in a way, I was). Then at the end of my gig in Georgia, bought a one-way from Georgia to Texas. With 30+ round-trips with “weekend stays” under my belt, I saved my employer about $3000 in ticket fees.