Ah, getting closer. Several airlines, depart Mon am - ret Sun.
One-way $210
RT $271
I think I’m wearing out my welcome. 
But I haven’t been able to find even one. Not with equiv. departure times.
Oh, all are SFO to SEA, the only two places worth going to.
The discounted tickets (rt, always) are never cheaper than a one-way on the same flight. Do I have to ask an agent in person and go standby?
One reason you’re not seeing a dramatic price difference in round-trip vs. one-way fares is that there is a lot of competition in the San Francisco-Seattle route. I think you’ll find a more dramatic difference in fares if you try a route that’s dominated by one airline.
Also the August 14-19 dates involve staying over the weekend. Try it again for a Tuesday-Thursday trip, which is a typical business trip. Also, try pricing a conventional ticket leaving on Tuesday and returning on Thursday, and then a pair of round trip tickets in which you only use half of each but both have return dates a couple of weeks out. That’s the sort of thing I’ve used to save lots of money on short business trips.
How about a classless discounter, like Southwest?
I’ll do a flight similar to what I’ll be doing here pretty soon. ABQ to BWI leaving in 10 days.
One-way: $299 (Note, however, that it is refundable at any time. However, that is the ONLY option.)
Round-trip (5 day difference to accomodate the person I’m traveling with and is going back home, but I’m not going home for probably 15 weeks): A range, not all of which might be possible or would’ve been if I had booked earlier, of $299, $280, $220, $192, and $139 each way. Total of $431 for round-trip.
So, in this case, I’d be better off on one-way, UNLESS, as I said before, they would allow me to change the back half later.
Not sure what this proves. However, I did read an article somewhere that figuring out the maximum profit point or something along those lines is now an unsolvable problem. So, I don’t feel too bad if I get a cross-country roundtrip for about 300 bucks.
Oh, I should have added that $431 was the lowest I could get with options available. That was, I believe, a $220 and a $192 stuck together; $220 on the way out and $192 on the way back.
I’m confused. First of all there seems to be two ideas, one, buy a round trip ticket & only use one way of it, & two, buy a multileg ticket & don’t use the last leg of it…
If you buy a RT ticket & only use one way then you can use the unused half again on the same routing some day in the future if you pay a change fee. But you can’t get a refund for it.
Sorry to resurect a dead thread…
I’m not so much confused about the one-way price jump as annoyed. As an example, a round trip this weekend from Washington (Dulles) to Chicago on United is $148/each, or $296 total. Taking the same flight up on Friday one-way turns into $349.
I would have no problem if the one-way was a little bit more ($30 - $50) than one leg of the round trip - I could see that for the round trip the airlines are filling two seats, so they would reward me with a discount. The fact that the one-way is more than twice as expense as one leg of the round trip, and almost 20% more expensive than the round trip itself is absurd.
I know that airlines play pricing games - a weekend holidayer is not going to pay $1000 to visit their parents in Phoenix. Flying anywhere Monday to Friday flags you in the reservation system as a business traveller, so following the rule of “all the market will bear” those tickets are always more expensive.
Usually when I’m on long travel stints, I book a one-way to the travel site, then book round trip tickets home on the weekends. This makes me look like a weekend traveller, and ends up being a hell of a lot cheaper for my company than doing Monday - Friday flights - often over $100 cheaper for each round trip.
My travel is over this week, and I already had a round trip booked, so I thought I’d be nice and call United and say that I wasn’t going to be taking the Monday flight after all. I figured they could then book it to somebody else, everybody’s happy. Instead, the agent said that I had to cancel my entire flight, buy a one-way ticket (at the full one-way price), and I would also incur a $100 change fee if I wanted to use the credits from the previous ticket.
I understand that they want to make money, but this seems like a bad way to treat your customers. In my mind, it seems like extortion. Like being charged more by a cab driver because you’re obviously in a hurry.
That’s what you get for being nice.
I wonder what they would have said if you told them after you took the flight home.
The term everyone’s been looking for to describe wanting to go (say) from SFO to ORD cheaply by booking a cheaper flight from SFO to DET, connecting in ORD and simply leaving the airport at ORD is hidden city.
Two big gotchas to flying hidden cities:
You must not have checked bags. Your bags will go to the ticketed end city and you’ll have a very hard time explaining to the airline why you left the airplane early and need your bags now. Actually, you may find yourself being paged to return to the gate before you get out of the airport. Once they discover bags are on the plane without a corresponding passenger, they tend to freak out and will pull the bags off and hand them over to the bomb squad.
Also, if you don’t check in for the connecting flight, any subsequent legs of the booking will be cancelled.
So, the two basic rules to fly hidden cities are:
Carry-on bags only and don’t try to do this on a round-trip.
A long time ago I looked at a flight from Chicago to Ottawa. It was crazy-expensive (like $800 or so). Romanian airlines offered a ORD-OTP (Bucarest) via Montreal for $500. Since this was all for one way it was cheaper to buy a ticket to Romania and just get off in Canada.
I ended up not doing this, but the fare situation is black magic.
I ranted about this in a Pit thread a few months ago, when my failure to show up for an outgoing flight meant that I lost the return flight, too. It’s why the big airlines are in trouble.
Major airline pricing is not particularly black, but it is magic to those of us used to commodity pricing. The key is the price discrimination Wolfrick and Hawthorne mentioned above. Airlines are trying to calibrate the price of a ticket to how much the consumer is willing to pay. This won’t work with commodity items, such as, say, Madonna CDs (I’ve used this analogy before and I’m too lazy to find the thread). Let’s say three people are willing to pay the following prices for a new Madonna CD:
A is a big fan, would pay $35 for it.
B likes her OK, but only if the album’s really good - $15 max.
C thinks she’s a bad joke, and will only buy her in the cutout bin - $5 max.
Sony can’t charge person A more than person B, because person A could simply buy the album from person B - each copy of the album is fungible. So they set a price at $15, hoping they’ll attract enough person Bs to make up for the margin lost by not charging the $35 that A would be happy to spend. They know that they’ll never be able to get person C.
Airlines realized that they didn’t have to make this compromise, because they could make the tickets nonfungible - and grab all three customers at all three prices. Essentially, airlines do their level best to freeze the economics exactly as they stand when a ticket is issued. That means no changes.
There are exceptions. Southwest offers much simpler pricing schemes, and much greater flexibility for travelers at a smaller range of prices. But the big airlines are stuck on a high-cost business model predicated on selling an awful lot of $2100 coach-class seats to business customers.
You do not seem to realize that it is because they do this that you could get those cheap fares. It is Business travellers who are subsidizing leisure passengers. if the airlines did not do that then leisure passengers would have to pay more.
I don’t know if that’s true of large corporations, sailor. I compared same-time fares that my business travel pays to what I could get on my own, and they were pretty close. My company also gets a rebate if they do enough business with the specific contracted airline (AA). We are encouraged, very strongly, to book with that airline. Volume talks, I suspect.
My last flight, RT Oakland to Dallas, was just $315 direct. I could have gotten it cheaper with less convenient departure times.
Peace,
mangeorge
The large corp I work for has similar arrangements, for hotels as well in some cases.
to the OP:
My little inventory brain sees the pricing game as something akin to a seasonal business with two layers of seasons. The Mon-Sun patterns determine make up the “micro-season” while the overall “macro-season” is a year which determines the range that the microseasons operate on.
I’m sure anyone with all of the flight stats could make sense of it but such things are often proprietary info. Toss in the different sizes of planes and their relative operating costs and you have a logistical nightmare, but far from an insurmounable one with the proper software analysis.
What I don’t understand is how the airlines consistently lose money when they have a fairly inelastic good, know their costs, they know their passenger numbers, and they have to keep a reserve of some kind to deal with fluctuations in fuel prices or to ride out the occasional price war.
Mangeorge part of the key to understanding how the airlines could possibly get away with charging more for two return airfares than two one ways (and other strange practices) is by understanding that the airlines deliberately use laziness, restriction of information and travellers own rationality against them.
Things are loosening up a little (particularly with many airlines giving potential customers the ability to fare shop on the internet) but typically, the airlines (with the willing assistance of agents) restrict customers from the ability to quickly scan for cheaper fares. Even on the internet, only some airlines with simple pricing structures simply set out in tables what their various fares are.
Generally, the airlines avoid providing anything so helpful like the plague.
My experience when I was travelling in a “money is more important than time” way (aaah, youth) was that fare shopping was a very very time consuming and frustrating experience. Try going into an agency and saying “I don’t care when I fly, just tell me the cheapest flight to destination X whenever!” and see how far you get. Some agents will try to help, but the computer systems in place are designed so as to only work the other way round: you tell the system when you want to fly, they’ll then tell you how much. And as others have said, the system takes your dates, makes an assessment based upon that of the type of traveller you are, and offers you a fare accordingly.
Many people can’t be bothered with the hassle. Many apply simple logic (such as you are doing) and assume that airlines would not do something as seemingly irrational as what the OP describes, so they simply do not ask the right questions to find out about the cheaper deals. The agents are usually on commission, so they certainly don’t want to sell you something cheaper than they have to.
The scenario you propose of walking up to the counter and asking careful questions and thereby learning about the seemingly irrational pricing of round trip and one way fares is all very well, but it assumes you know to ask the right questions, which the great masses do not.
Mangeorge part of the key to understanding how the airlines could possibly get away with charging more for two return airfares than two one ways (and other strange practices) is by understanding that the airlines deliberately use laziness, restriction of information and travellers own rationality against them.
Things are loosening up a little (particularly with many airlines giving potential customers the ability to fare shop on the internet) but typically, the airlines (with the willing assistance of agents) restrict customers from the ability to quickly scan for cheaper fares. Even on the internet, only some airlines with simple pricing structures simply set out in tables what their various fares are.
Generally, the airlines avoid providing anything so helpful like the plague.
My experience when I was travelling in a “money is more important than time” way (aaah, youth) was that fare shopping was a very very time consuming and frustrating experience. Try going into an agency and saying “I don’t care when I fly, just tell me the cheapest flight to destination X whenever!” and see how far you get. Some agents will try to help, but the computer systems in place are designed so as to only work the other way round: you tell the system when you want to fly, they’ll then tell you how much. And as others have said, the system takes your dates, makes an assessment based upon that of the type of traveller you are, and offers you a fare accordingly.
Many people can’t be bothered with the hassle. Many apply simple logic (such as you are doing) and assume that airlines would not do something as seemingly irrational as what the OP describes, so they simply do not ask the right questions to find out about the cheaper deals. The agents are usually on commission, so they certainly don’t want to sell you something cheaper than they have to.
The scenario you propose of walking up to the counter and asking careful questions and thereby learning about the seemingly irrational pricing of round trip and one way fares is all very well, but it assumes you know to ask the right questions, which the great masses do not.
Mangeorge part of the key to understanding how the airlines could possibly get away with charging more for two return airfares than two one ways (and other strange practices) is by understanding that the airlines deliberately use laziness, restriction of information and travellers own rationality against them.
Things are loosening up a little (particularly with many airlines giving potential customers the ability to fare shop on the internet) but typically, the airlines (with the willing assistance of agents) restrict customers from the ability to quickly scan for cheaper fares. Even on the internet, only some airlines with simple pricing structures simply set out in tables what their various fares are.
Generally, the airlines avoid providing anything so helpful like the plague.
My experience when I was travelling in a “money is more important than time” way (aaah, youth) was that fare shopping was a very very time consuming and frustrating experience. Try going into an agency and saying “I don’t care when I fly, just tell me the cheapest flight to destination X whenever!” and see how far you get. Some agents will try to help, but the computer systems in place are designed so as to only work the other way round: you tell the system when you want to fly, they’ll then tell you how much. And as others have said, the system takes your dates, makes an assessment based upon that of the type of traveller you are, and offers you a fare accordingly.
Many people can’t be bothered with the hassle. Many apply simple logic (such as you are doing) and assume that airlines would not do something as seemingly irrational as what the OP describes, so they simply do not ask the right questions to find out about the cheaper deals. The agents are usually on commission, so they certainly don’t want to sell you something cheaper than they have to.
The scenario you propose of walking up to the counter and asking careful questions and thereby learning about the seemingly irrational pricing of round trip and one way fares is all very well, but it assumes you know to ask the right questions, which the great masses do not.
Thanks for all the informative posts on this intriguing question. I would like to renew the OP question as follows:
I buy a round-trip ticket, I don’t use the return portion.
The airline has my money, what they don’t have is my body in that return-flight seat.
They save a buck or two on fuel, beverage, peanuts, etc.
I would not have bought the one-way ticket that cost $x more than my round-trip ticket, I would have taken the bus/train/whatever instead, so they didn’t lose a better sale from me.
What are they upset about? What have they lost? What have I cost them?
The only thing that makes sense to me is the thought that I crowded out a better paying customer. How likely is that? (Offhand, it doesn’t seem very likely to me.)
I’m not the one who walked up to the counter, Princhester. I’m the one who went to Dallas. 
Lets say, Gary T. that they don’t get upset. Instead, they sell your return seat for more than you paid for your rt. Don’t cost you nuttin’, but they make out like a bandit, and you find out. Do you get upset?
I really don’t think I would, but I can see how it would be easy to grumble about the apparent discrepancy.