I have taken some flights that were very cheap, but had stops that went very far out of the way. I once flew from Portland, ME to Baltimore via NYC and Detroit. Seriously, they made me unnecessarily fly halfway across the country to get the discount. How can this possibly save the airline any money? More planes= more maintenance and landing fees. That extra distance takes a lot of fuel.
I think generally, the answer, is that flying halfway across the country results in fewer planes than getting you exactly where you want to go via a direct flight; you see more planes personally, but there are fewer planes total in the system.
Suppose there are 100 cities with airports on the east side of the country. To have direct flights for all possible connections would mean 10,000 flights. Setting up a hub in NYC and flying everybody through there would mean only 99 flights. Of course, the NYC airport isn’t big enough for everybody flying on the East coast, so you have more hubs, but that’s the basic idea. Most people will get where they’re going with just 2 flights.
In your specific case, with 2 layovers, it seems likely that all 3 flights happened to have a seat that would otherwise be unused, so they were all available for extra-cheap. Were they on different airlines?
They didn’t send those three planes just for you. The marginal cost of letting you fly on a plane that is going to take off or land anyway is pretty low. They had an empty seat on each of those legs and they likely had a financial model said those seats weren’t going to be sold at any higher price. They gave all the cheap seats to you and you considered it a bargain.
It’s because planes are going between those cities anyway, and some of them have empty seats. It doesn’t save the airlines money, but it makes them some by being able to sell seats that otherwise wouldn’t be sold at all. You’re going an extra distance, but the planes (and most of the people on them) aren’t.
But, the planes were flying those routes regardless of your butt being in a seat.
We once bought tickets back to N America, from SE Asia that left Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, then Bangkok, Tokyo, Seattle, etc, because it was cheaper than buying the same ticket without initiating in KL. Then we just didn’t use that portion of the ticket and picked the flight up in Bangkok, and went from there. I think it saved us a couple of hundred dollars.
Sometimes it just doesn’t seem to make any sense at all!
Airline ticket prices aren’t based on a cost plus model.
When was this? I think these days most airlines will cancel the entire itinerary if you miss any part of it.
Unless it involves multiple airlines. It is getting better, but I have had to re-check bags in the last year. They seem to cooperate to sell tickets, but the logistics pieces have not caught up.
I wasn’t aware that discount tickets were available including legs on different airlines, unless maybe they had a code-share arrangement.
Plus round the world fares usually give a little more leeway, in my experience. And the agent we bought it from knew how we intended to use it. But it was some years ago, so things may be different now.
Another way of looking at the situation is that there was space available using this ridiculous routing, and they had to offer it cheap to get anyone to put up with the hassle.
In other words, it isn’t a circuitous route because it is cheap, it is cheap because it is circuitous.
The cheapest fare I’ve used in the last ten years was from Chicago to Rome for $298(all fees included) on Northwest (now Delta). It required Chicago to Detroit, then to Amsterdam to switch to KLM on to Rome. On the way back, it was Rome, Amsterdam, Memphis and then Chicago. They had just initiated the Detroit to Amsterdam/Rome route which is why the tickets were so cheap.
We were early arrivals for the 7:00 AM flight from Rome to Amsterdam, so they put us in business class. I took the boarding passes, then told them to look at how much we paid; the ticket agent just laughed.
Yea, there can be some oddities out there. My grandparents used to travel frequently, and to save money would end up with layovers in some odd places. They once flew out of Pittsburgh to Miami, and detoured to Minneapolis. Its more cost effective to have three full planes, than three half full ones.
Exactly.
In effect the OP was buying the scraps left over after we’d already sold all the desirable goods to other higher-paying customers.
The miracle is that the computers can assemble something that looks at least plausible from the scrap pile.
Sometimes, like when buying bacon ends, the scraps are not only much cheaper but also much better than the mainstream goods. Other times, like for air travel, the scraps are, well, scraps. Odds are the OP spent more on airport sandwiches than he saved on the tickets
Plus the reality that every stop-over increases the odds of a problem. By the time you get to 4 legs & 3 stops each way it’s well over 50/50 that something will go wrong along the way, be it oversale, mechanical, weather, etc.
Back when I was in college in Minnesota, it was basically impossible to get a decent deal on Minneapolis to Detroit direct because Northwest was the major hub at both locations so no one else flew between them. Most of the time I went through Chicago, but once I went through Atlanta. That’s almost 3 times the distance (539 vs. 1500).
I was once looking at flights from CA to Glacier Bay Park in AK. The cheap flight had 6 legs over the course of 22 hours. The expensive flight was something like half that (for both numbers).
Yes there are and I have taken them regularly. The big travel sites like Travelocity and Expedia also work as airline seat aggregators at least in the U.S. They offer tickets on two or more unaffiliated airlines in a single round-trip. Some of them are quite inconvenient but others aren’t and they are often cheaper than booking a round-trip with a single airline. I have taken as many as three different airlines on a single round trip using that method. The main reasons are that one of the routes is desirable but the same airline doesn’t have an equivalent schedule available on the opposite leg. It is usually cheaper as well. You generally won’t good good seats but you will get there exactly the same time as everyone else on the flights.
It is the same idea as paying for two or more one-way tickets except airlines won’t let you do that directly without an enormous cost penalty. The major travel sites put together their own bundles based on vacant seats and do the work for you at a huge discount.
as has been said, you’re viewing this from a position of Unwarranted Self Importance.
the plane(s) were going to those destinations anyway, regardless of whether you were on it. The airlines would rather get some money from you to park your ass in a seat than fly the plane(s) with that seat empty and unpaid-for.
/travel guru hat ON/
Airlines have a number of fares available at any given time from an origin to a destination city (they call them “buckets”) and the lowest fare in any given bucket may not be available on a nonstop flight for the date you choose; but available on a single-connection or double-connection option. If that lower fare is not available on any given sector of the journey, then it’s not available for the entire distance. But the more (airline approved) connecting cities that are added to the mix, the greater the chance that the lowest-fared inventory will be available all the way from origin to destination.
Let’s say you need a fare designation of “Q” on a specific airline (or number of airlines that belong to the same alliance). If no seats are available in “Q” inventory on the nonstop flights, they may be available on a routing requiring one or more stops.
Airline rules (read them the next time you shop for a flight) for the lowest fares tend to be long, difficult to understand, full of restrictions, and heavy on the penalties. Alternately, the fares with no restrictions tend to be higher than most of the non-business-traveler can afford.
/travel guru hat OFF/