Only tautological propositions are truly self-evident; the rest are evident only if you look for the evidence.
...he said, before proceeding to give an a priori argument.
If anyone has any data about what the airline industry would look like without price discrimination I would be very interested to see it! Before this (fascinating) thread I had never thought about the issue. It's really counterintutive, and I would be curious to know what the magnitude of the effect is.
...he said, before proceeding to give an a priori argument.
What? If the airline industry had, say, Intel's or Apple's profit margins, then the argument that I gave would not hold. I left out what their profit margins were because I figured everyone in the conversation would either know already or look them up.
If anyone has any data about what the airline industry would look like without price discrimination I would be very interested to see it!
Check out, say, section 3 of this paper. (In general, "revenue management" is the term of art.) T...
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.