No, I don't think so. For one thing, pjeby thinks that price discrimination "is generally someone lowering prices" and I don't think this is true. Price discrimination involves charging different amounts to different people, depending on their reserve price, and the seller, of course, tries to make the total/average amount as high as he can, to the best of his ability. Even if you take the seller out of the equation and look only at the buyers, price discrimination amounts to a wealth transfer from the high-reserve-price people (the wealthy and the desperate) to the low-reserve-price people (the poor and the meh, whatevs).
Price discrimination involves charging different amounts to different people, depending on their reserve price, and the seller, of course, tries to make the total/average amount as high as he can, to the best of his ability.
Agreed, but pjeby's already established that he's making the comparison to a state where price discrimination is impossible, and relative to that it does seem reasonable to expect that the mean price under discrimination will be lower, often significantly so, and especially in the context of airlines.
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.