The business traveller in those days was different. First, they were not personally paying for the flight, so cost was not as big an issue. If you were important enough for the company to pay your way, then whether the ticket was $400 or $700 was less important than getting you there.
Yes, business travellers preferred convenience. No business happened on weekends (for the bigwigs who got paid to fly places) so head home by Friday afternoon. They also paid the higher fare for a flexible ticket, in case they had to change their plans last minute. They’d prefer flying direct and at civilized hours, usually.
The pleasure traveller was mostly concerned about cost. If I can save $200 by leaving at 5AM, or staying over a weekend, or going via a stopover so the airline could fill usually empty seats - go for it!
So what the airlines did was structure their fares so you could find cheap flights, but the conditions attached were too inconvenient for the higher-paying spoiled business travellers to take advantage of.
(I recall one meeting I was in where the big boss droned on, and the guys who had a short flight home went out to reschedule their departure flight from 1PM, to 3PM, to 7PM when the meeting finally was over. They had the most expensive tickets so no cost to change schedule.)
Today, businesses are far more cost-conscious, conference video has replaced some of the earlier need for flying, etc. so the business flyer market is not as good as it used to be. If you are still one of the more pampered business travellers, the “no charge to reschedule” tickets are still available - but the price difference is substantial.
Some of these things are not not like the others. Some flight times and connections were more popular than others because they are used by business travelers so they commanded a higher price, but that’s just basic supply in demand. Vacationers who were particular about time would pay the premium, and business travelers with time flexibility wouldn’t.
But the whole “round trip over a weekend” thing was just market segmentation. It was just trying to identify two “kinds” of travelers with different price points and offer one group a price that is cheap enough that planes get filled, without offering the low price to people who would pay more.
My impression is that the former kind of pricing is still a thing, but the latter is not.
I don’t have anything to add except to point out that i’m more of a yokel than I realized. I thought international travel was just a routine part of modern life. I have friends who do it every couple of years.
17,000 dollars for a couple to visit Asia? Just for the getting there and back? Holy god. I just can’t imagine.
Paid off home and mid 100’s combined income and the thought of dropping $17000 on a plane trip makes me feel weak in the knees. I just had no idea this was something that apparently people do.
Note “Delta One” is not economy. It’s a premium ticket and I’m not shocked at the cost. I imagine you could get a single economy ticket closer to $1500-$2000 round trip. Maybe less depending on time of year and how busy things are.
ETA: doing a quick check, I can get a roundtrip flight from Houston to Tokyo for mid September for ~$2000 non-stop or ~$1200 with a stop. Upgrading to business class adds a lot to the cost.
From 2011 to 2016 I was routinely flying between Detroit and Shanghai. Business class was regularly $5000 to $6500. I kept careful track of this because home leave was paid in a lump sum for business class rates, but I was happy to use Delta Comfort Plus for $1500 or so.
I’m dreading what the prices are going to be next year, for a family of four.
As @Great_Antibob points out, Delta One is the best accommodations Delta Airlines has available:
You’re among the first on/off the plane (the latter is really helpful after arrival when you end up at the front of the line for customs/immigration), you have airport lounge access, you get good food on the plane (and plenty of it) served with real dishes and silverware, a seat that can convert to a flat bed so you can get some proper sleep, a bigger entertainment screen, privacy walls (albeit only 4 feet tall), and more.
You can fly for less in Premium Select, even less in Comfort Plus, and of course the lowest cost comes from choosing economy class. The first couple of times my wife and I went to Japan, we flew economy class, then we started upgrading to Comfort Plus. Now we’re a bit older, which means:
our bodies are less tolerant of cramped seating, and
we have more money to work with.
Like you, $17K is a bit much for us. But for a little over half of that amount, plus a little bit of logistical hassle, we’re interested.
FWIW, international airfares from the US are probably cheaper for European destinations since they’re closer to much of the US than Japan is. But Detroit-to-Tokyo is a long flight - 6500 miles, about 13 hours. That’s a lot of food, a lot of fuel, plus even more fuel just to be able to carry that fuel, and a backup crew, since the crew that’s on duty at the start of the flight isn’t allowed to work for long enough to finish the flight.
IIRC one of the other distinguishing features airlines also used to use to separate the business traveller from the leisure traveller was a lower price for tickets bought two weeks ahead of time. Most vacations were planned long in advance, while business travel was often on shorter notice. (But they had discounts for travel to family funerals, in deference to its lesser notice time.)
I seem to recall cheap “standby” disappeared as an option too a while ago, because before 9-11 as competition heated up, airlines tended to have empty seats, and standby became a safe bet. Too many standby passengers were actually people who could have booked much earlier.
I remember back in the day, aircraft never seemed to be full. Today, I don’t think I’ve flown on an aircraft in the last decade or two that was not completely full. (Except the flight from Italy back to NYC two weeks after 9-11 which was maybe 1/4 full.)
Is it against airline policy to buy a ticket and then not show up? I don’t see how missing one leg of the flight is any worse than missing the whole thing.
That sort of happened to me. I was going DEN-ORD-LHR. The DEN-ORD flight was late, arriving minutes before the LHR flight was leaving. The airline knew this and held the door long enough for me to get on the plane. They were closing the door behind me. (No, my bags did not make the connection.) Memory is a hazy thing. I remember the gate agent greeting me by name, and rushing me on board. My guess is my boarding pass was never scanned.
I arrive, my bags arrive on a later flight and are delivered. I do my business in the UK, and am returning a week later. I go to check-in and they tell me my ticket had been cancelled because I wasn’t on the outbound flight. Fortunately the agent at check-in accepted my presence in front of her as proof that I had been on the original flight, and after some phone and computer time was able to re-issue my ticket. It did turn what should have been a routine 3 minute check-in to a 20 minute event backing up the queue for everyone else.
So, because according the airline’s computers I was not on the outbound flight, and made no other arrangements, the rest of my itinerary was cancelled. Of course, traveling from Denver to Chicago by buying a ticket to London would never be a winning plan. (Though for the year or two post 9/11, the DEN-ORD part was 75% of the ticket price from DEN-ORD-LHR.)
Same here. It’s like wanting to buy a burger and fries, and finding out it’s cheaper to buy a value meal of burger, fries and coke and just eat the burger and fries. “Nope! You must drink the coke or have nothing at all!”
You could have been based in London and wanted a single flight, a return is often cheaper than a single and it could be the case that a return flight is cheaper starting in Denver than London.
You could have travelled to London on a competitor flight you made two bookings to give you flexibility which flight you use (and airlines often think you should pay more thean twice the price if you want flexibility.
Oh yeah, it could have been bad. I spent the time standing there getting worked up to fight them about it, and strategizing how quickly to escalate my demeanor from patient to angry, etc. Of course when the agent came out with a seat I was all smiles and thanking them.
I just had no idea this was something that apparently people do.