We only have the modern air industry at the size and level of connections that it is because of the sophisticated price discrimination.
That's not self-evident to me, but we are venturing into counterfactuals by now.
In any case, I have no objection to companies trying to engage in price discrimination -- they have full rights to attempt to do so. What I object to is the idea that I, as a consumer, cannot try to game their price discrimination schemes. The suggestion that I am morally obligated to meekly go along with whatever techniques companies devise to maximize their revenues is... strange to me :-D
That's not self-evident to me, but we are venturing into counterfactuals by now.
Only tautological propositions are truly self-evident; the rest are evident only if you look for the evidence. (Specifically, consider the profit margin of the airline industry. If we believe that price discrimination raises their revenue, a world without that would imply less revenue and thus less profit, which would put it well into the negatives, forcing cutbacks on marginal routes until we have a significantly constrained industry and customers paying much higher prices ...
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.