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Comment by jorvi | Hacker News Reader

Tickets should also be liberated from being person-bound. If I have to cancel a NL-CHN trip a week in advance, I lose most (if not all) of the money spent on it, and any recoups are in the form of vouchers. And the airline still resells the seat! However, if I could just sell the ticket on the secondary market, I’d recoup most of my costs.

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I'm sympathetic to the ban on ticket transfers since allowing that would create a market for ticket scalpers. Buy up inventory on a popular route well enough in advance so the prices are low, wait until the flight fills up, and then resell tickets for a higher price.

This is what currently happens with tickets to music and sporting events, and you end up with actual attendees spending more money than they'd otherwise have to pay, while random predatory third parties pocket the difference.

I met someone a couple years ago who admitted to me that she was essentially a professional ticket scalper, buying up tickets to shows she knew would become popular and would be able to make a profit on. She was careful to purchase in a way that was unlikely to get flagged by Ticketmaster's (and other's) systems to detect this sort of thing, and always stayed under ticket maximums and avoid shows where transferring tickets is harder to do. She was actually supporting her entire lifestyle doing this, without having another job. I found it pretty gross. I don't want to see this happening with airline tickets as well.

But that is exactly how the market would look from the consumer side if the airlines had perfect information.

You could do that in the past but airlines didn’t like it for the reason you mention.

The airline doesn't like it because it enables ticket arbitraging. (That's the reason they're fixed to your name) Also for tracking (err security.. but that's not really their fault)

There was a story that checking ID's on plane tickets was at the top of the airlines lobbying wishlist after 9/11 so they could curtail the practice of people selling unused tickets to another (same gender) person.

If you look at the current situation of the market for concert/festival tickets, you can see why this isn't so bad for consumers.

Which both situations are made worse by locking in the consumer and preventing them from backing out of the transaction.

I've never completely understood why this was the case. If I'd be theoretically capable of finding a friend (or even complete stranger) to sell my plane ticket to if I found I couldn't travel, then it should be equally easy for the airline to do so. And yet, refundable fares are often significantly more expensive than non-refundable fares.

I can certainly understand and support some kind of monetary penalty for breaking out of a reservation, but it seems like airlines err too far on the side of making you think twice before canceling or changing your plans after the initial 24h window is up, and penalizing you heavily if you end up doing so.

Indeed and not that long it was very common to sell airline tickets you had purchase but could no longer use.

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