Thanks for answering!
This does fall under "price gouging" just as I suspected (though you use the more morally neutral term "price discrimination", which I aught to have used but I didn't know the term. Price discrimination is not unethical. However, I'm not certain that avoiding price discrimination is unethical either.
Price discrimination operates in coffee shops too - most of the cost is the building and the employee, and the actual drinks don't really effect anything - the differential pricing of the drinks is price discrimination. Similarly at the grocery store, using coupons is price discrimination - only people who put in the time and effort to use coupons pay less, and people who don't use coupons subsidize that. Would it be unethical to have a device that automatically generates coupons for everything? It certainly "defects" in that it raises prices for everyone and lowers prices for yourself.
...yet, it's not the same thing, because you did sign a contract with the airline to take the entire flight, not to mention the empty seat. It is morally gray to break contract. I do find it ... counter-intuitive ... to morally chastise defection strategies fighting price gouging on the part of consumers, because of how incredibly often businesses defect against consumers. Businesses break unenforceable contracts constantly, so it's hard to be persuasive when appealing to the "little guy" consumer's honor against the airline industry as a whole.
Unenforceable contracts in general create an incentive structure (What Yvain describes as "Moloch") where defection means winning and cooperation means losing. I haven't yet determined my position on whether or not moral people aught to allow themselves to lose within incentive structures rewarding immorality... on one hand, morality means being willing to lose self-interest to win community interest, but on the other hand this stance naturally causes moral people to lose and immoral people to win, and that shifts the good-evil power balance in a dangerous way. (I realize that's a really simplistic way to put it).
I'm curious as to whether you in-general support that "moral" people should allow themselves to lose and cede power to those who are willing to be "immoral" in these incentive structures, although I suppose you've tapped out on discussing the moral aspects on this.
In any case, I guess the upcoming court case will soon decide whether or not these contracts are enforceable, and that avoids the philosophical debate.
This does fall under "price gouging" just as I suspected (though you use the more morally neutral term "price discrimination",
These aren't synonyms. "Gouging" implies that somebody is raising prices in order to make extra profit than the usual. Price discrimination is generally someone lowering prices to a market segment in order to pick up extra business, without lowering all their prices, in order to get the advantages I described above. AFAIK, the airlines didn't actually raise their rates when they were deregulated ...
I was going to wait to post this for reasons, but realized that was pretty dumb when the difference of a few weeks could literally save people hundreds, if not thousands of collective dollars.
If you fly regularly (or at all), you may already know about this method of saving money. The method is quite simple: instead of buying a round-trip ticket from the airline or reseller, you hunt down much cheaper one-way flights with layovers at your destination and/or your point of origin. Skiplagged is a service that will do this automatically for you, and has been in the news recently because the creator was sued by United Airlines and Orbitz. While Skiplagged will allow you to click-through to purchase the one-way ticket to your destination, they have broken or disabled the functionality of the redirect to the one-way ticket back (possibly in order to raise more funds for their legal defense). However, finding the return flight manually is fairly easy as the provide all the information to filter for it on other websites (time, airline, etc). I personally have benefited from this - I am flying to Texas from Southern California soon, and instead of a round-trip ticket which would cost me about $450, I spent ~$180 on two one-way tickets (with the return flight being the "layover" at my point-of-origin). These are, perhaps, larger than usual savings; I think 20-25% is more common, but even then it's a fairly significant amount of money.
Relevant warnings by gwillen:
Additionally, you should do all of your airline/hotel/etc shopping using whatever private browsing mode your web browser has. This will often let you purchase the exact same product for a cheaper price.
That is all.