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 -- they lowered some of them to get more business. (I could be wrong about that though.)
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.
I think it's a mistake to think this is a you-vs-the-airline scenario, precisely because the airline has more power than individuals. The airline can't be forced to do business at a loss, which means that non-cheaters will -- one way or another -- be paying to subsidize the cheaters. (Whether it's in higher cost or lower availability.)
Price discrimination is generally someone lowering prices to a market segment in order to pick up extra business, without lowering all their prices
That's not the standard definition. Price discrimination is all about capturing consumer surplus as revenue. See e.g. Wikipedia:
...The purpose of price discrimination is generally to capture the market's consumer surplus. This surplus arises because, in a market with a single clearing price, some customers (the very low price elasticity segment) would have been prepared to pay more than the single market price
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.