How to Beat High Airfares
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Now the thing is, if I book SEA->MSP->DFW for Friday and MSP->SEA for Sunday I don't see how Delta could not notice this and block me from flying because of abusing this system.
Actually, I have done something like this before. When I moved from Europe to the US I booked a return ticket because it was 500 Euro cheaper than going one way, knowing fully well that I would never be on that return flight.
You obviously will have trouble checking baggage doing this, too.
Ironic that the NYT cracks down on people evading its paywall but is selling content on doing the same for air travel.
Is it ethical for airlines to charge you more for A->B than a flight going from A->B->C?
I don't know. Is it obviously unethical for them to do so?
It's a sensible observation that a subset of X should be priced lower than X, but is it a moral one? Or, if the airline can make more money by charging more for A->B than A->C via B then, heck, it's their airplane, let 'em do what they want!
In general, airlines don't like to have people's checked luggage travel separately from them - and they don't know if the missing person checked luggage or not. So, they either have to do a count, get everyone in their correct seat, or delay the plane until the person gets back on.
It's a cute hack, but an annoying one for everyone caught up in it.
But they should do something, if indeed it is a problem (I'm not sure it actually is). Creating an obvious arbitrage opportunity and then structuring your operations in a way that isn't robust to some proportion of people exploiting it wouldn't be a very responsible way to run a business.
The fact that the NYT was consulting with Trial Lawyers as to the legality of this, is some indication of how sketchy this behavior is.
BTW - all of this thread applies to layovers where the plane lands, and some people deplane, while others stay in their seats.
None of this applies to the situation where you have to get onto another plane, or, as I've had happen to me a couple times, they require you to exit the plane and then get back on. Particularly if you didn't check luggage. I'm fine with people playing that game - usually only causes a minute or two delay, if that.
So you're the reason the lawyers don't let us do fun stuff in the US anymore!
Nothing is forcing people to minimize costs at the expense of others. There are many things I could do that are not technically illegal, but cause great problems for others. Is the responsibility of corporations to make it costly for me to be immoral? That seems to be what you're saying.
I'm guessing this is some sort of security rule? It doesn't matter tho, it absolutely sucks for everyone else on the flight.
It's a security rule if you have checked bags. If you're gonna blow up a plane they want to make sure you're at least onboard when you do it. Otherwise it's just a convenience thing -- they don't wanna close the doors and then have you show up two minutes later, because then you're a problem they have to deal with. The one time I actually did miss a connection I wound up with a free night in a very nice hotel, but the whole thing soaked up quite a few man-hours of time at the airline's end.
No it's not. People fly on flights other than their bags all the time. If you check in and miss your flight, your bags often get there before you do and might even take a different routing. I missed a Southwest flight from MDW to PDX once. I ended up flying MDW-OAK-PDX, and my bags were in Portland long before I was.
There may be a rule for international flights, but I can't find a source on this. (The "you must use the lav in the cabin in which you are ticketed" rule only applies on international flights, for example. It may even only apply on international flights to the US, not from the US. After all, the 9/11 planes were international flights to the US. Oh wait...)
It's much like the drug user's rationalization of the fact that the money he spends goes to support organized crime. "Well," he says, "that's the government's fault for not legalizing the drugs I wish to take!"
I think I've decided where it leaves me: upset at both the bad-market creators and at the individuals who make choices knowing the ill-effects of those choices.
Come to think of it, this question is about as close to an objective measure of an individual's level of morality as we can get. Screw all theories of moral relativism; I can tell whether you're a good person or not by knowing how much money it would take to tempt you to leave an entire planeload of people sitting on the tarmac for an extra ten minutes.
Lets consider a few hypothetical scenarios:
1. You can get 50 dollars but it may potentially result in 60 minutes of delay for 100 people. Would you turn it down?
2. You can get 1000 dollars but it may potentially result in 5 minutes of delay for 100 people. Would you turn it down?
3. You can get 10,000 dollars but it can potentially result in 5 minutes of delay for 100 people. Would you turn it down?
4. You can get 100 Million dollars but it can potentially result in 3 minutes of delay for 100 people. Would you turn it down?
5. What if you are broke and have a child to support?
Your reply is the equivalent of answering "If a genie grants you one single wish, what would it be?" with "I'll wish for a million wishes" :-)
And your reply subscribes to moral relativism too ('If I give them $x each, then it is okay to delay them. What is a few minutes anyway?'). Also note that $x that you are suggesting to give per person times 100 is just 1% of your gain. You don't know how much you cost them with the few minutes of delay that you caused. Perhaps someone missed a connecting flight and lost the chance to see his mom before she passed away.
If you push a button at a pedestrian crossing so you can cross the road, you're stopping potentially hundreds of cars just for your benefit. How much have you cost them? What if one of those is someone who's racing to the airport to catch a flight to see their mom who's about to pass away, and your decision to cross the road then delays them just enough to miss their flight?
Please note in my first comment I was replying to the statement: "Screw all theories of moral relativism; I can tell whether you're a good person or not by knowing how much money it would take to tempt you to leave an entire planeload of people sitting on the tarmac for an extra ten minutes." I tried to explain that he will become a moral relativist if the 'rewards' are high enough. In the second comment, I tried to explain that handing $10K to each doesn't correct it. It just makes you feel better. Still moral relativism.
Let's go with a smaller plane... My friend who is into airplanes tells me that 40 is a good estimate for shuttle planes from small cities to bigger hubs (30ish to 50ish, I just averaged them). So every 10 minutes you waste is about 6.5 man hours. Again valuing people's time at $10 per hour, you'd have to save $65 to break even (though that relies on pretty low valuation of the value of people's time).
Disregarding the infamous rich brats you see on TV, rich people are in general very frugal and do care about dimes and nickels. That's how many of them got rich in the first place.
And regardless, billionaires are in a minority.
college students that eat lots of ramen are already
valuing money more than their own health
Speaking as a college student, college students eat ramen today so they can eat ramen tomorrow instead of eating steak today and not eating tomorrow.
And when I say "tomorrow", I really mean the whole week.
I hope that the person at the airlines who came up with the pricing model is also bound by the same moral framework. Something like - how big a bonus does it need to tempt you in coming up with a scheme which robs thousands of customers of your employer an extra $5 for the next few years?
So most people will do this ticket hack even if it saves them just $5, or even just out of spite ("You made me jump through hoops? OK, now you sit and wait for me, haha!" kind of reaction). I am not justifying it or saying they are right, just illustrating the possible thought process.
Now from a market point of view, airlines are trying to solve this insanely complicated problem on how to maximize their profits from all these seats on their flights. It is almost like trying to do central planning on an economy of a small country -- this seat on this flight should cost X because we think demand for it is Y, unless demand changes and then we can increase the price, and then there are different legs, through different hubs, other partner airlines that try to do the same, it is just so complicated. So they end up creating these inefficiencies with inadvertent arbitrage possibilities. And people are taking advantage. Apparently they know about it and they are trying to put all kind of threatening legal mumbo-jumbo in their fine print. But they can't enforce it.
I think as more people start finding out and doing this they could: 1) ban customers in the future, 2) make them pay a fee next time they purchase, 3) lobby the govt. to declare this a grave security concern and make TSA chase these people down 4) try to adjust their pricing and fair structure to do away with this inefficiency.
Now there is no reason to delay the flight.
A person who wants to blow up an airliner. That's the point.
For those traveling with checked luggage, this "hop off" tactic won't work, unless passengers want to lose their bags.
For those without checked luggage, the airlines have no way of determining whether your carry-on bags are still on the plane or not, short of emptying the plane and reboarding (which I have never seen before).
* Yes, I'm aware this is a cognitive bias. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
Ironic that the NYT cracks down on people evading its paywall but is selling content on doing the same for air travel.
The NYT has done no such thing. They have gone after people for trademark violation. Big diffence :)
Note this is also possible if you check luggage: the airline is not obligated to let you get the luggage off the onward flight, but there's no airline that wants to carry baggage for a passenger who's not on the flight anymore (for security reasons).
If you're planning such a stunt (with baggage), try to have around 3 hours hop-time; else you WILL be delaying the onward flight with your luggage.
Layovers > 4 hours are considered as off-the-airport stopovers (domestically, US). That means the fare you'll get for SFO->DFW->BOS = SFO->DFW + DFW->BOS (made up routing). Exceptions: DEN for UA, ORD for AA, SEA and ORD for AS etc ("transit hubs", that is); where stopovers are free.
When you buy the ticket you agree to a set of accompanying conditions. Doing that knowing you're going to deliberately break some of them is dishonest and immoral.
Why should customers show the airlines any more courtesy than they are shown by the airlines in such matters?
When you walk away, you are one-sidedly breaking your agreement.
It's quite easy to see that two parties making a voluntary agreement != unethical, while one party breaking that agreement == unethical.
What actually seems unethical to me is that airlines have contract terms forbidding getting off early. An honest and effective, though not profitable means of preventing passengers from doing so would be to charge less for one leg than for two.
I don't see why you are obliged to use more of the service than you want to. If I buy a train ticket from DC-Boston and hop off in NYC, no one's going to care. Airlines get special treatment?
What if I had left a bag on the train? There seems to be some issue with leaving it on a plane and losing it. As long as I'm not a terrorist (which I'm not) and they have screened my bags, I don't see the issue. On the flip side, the airline doesn't really care if they lost your bag and don't know where it is. The bag not being tied to you does not put a bomb in it.
Plus, people travel on planes that their bags aren't on all the time and we have no indicator that people doing bad things are more likely to want to be off the plane than on it.
Incidentally, note that the same airline pricing quirk you'd be exploiting to save ~$100 is also costing other people on the plane; it's not quite a zero sum game, but has some of the same dynamics, as prices rise with occupancy on planes.
If you believe obtaining the best possible price for a service by inconveniencing other consumers is ethical, I can save us a protracted and boring argument by stipulating that there is then nothing unethical about hidden-city itineraries.
But if you don't think that, then let me warn you that the instinct to fob off responsibility for people's actions to the big faceless corporation is natural and understandable, but also very hazardous to your moral health.
They could always allow some way for you to inform them, "I'm leaving, don't wait for me." (or simply you could just go to that gate and tell them. That way they aren't holding the plane, and no one else is at a loss. You don't inconvenience anyone else, except maybe a few confused people working at the gate.
None of this still solves the issue that airlines don't have transparent pricing. If restaurants acted like airlines, you'd have people in the same place paying anywhere from $5 to $200 for the same meal, and you'd be unsure of one day to the next how much they'll be charging. You could even pay for your meal upfront, only to find that they 'oversold' the meals and you'll have to go hungry.
If you want to talk about unethical, let's talk about inconveniencing customers by overselling flights.
However, I will note that as annoying as airline pricing is, particularly to geeks but yes to everyone else too, they do serve a function of capturing revenue from customers who aren't price sensitive (biz travelers) and thus lowering fares for people who are very price sensitive (older leisure travelers). You would not be able to argue that airfares were "unethical" if they simply and "transparently" locked in a constant average fair $150 higher than the current bottom end price on Kayak, but the airlines would be making the same money.
For all the complaining and anger around airline pricing, it's also worth noting that these companies aren't Exxon; they aren't rolling in cash. Airlines go BK all the time. It's a tough business.
Take a cruise somewhere, stop along the way and you think to stay there for good? They don't care.
Take a Greyhound bus somewhere and stay in the Arby's too long? They don't care if you want to stay in that random town.
Take a train somewhere, and they certainly won't care where you get off.
Buy a commuter rail pass that will get you to Worchester from Boston, tell the attendant that you're going to Worchester and then get off in Newton... they don't care.
And you know when the airline doesn't care? When you buy the ticket and don't show up at all. They'll happily take your cash, but it seems they don't want to take you halfwhere there.
The office analogy is wrong. A better one would be the person who tells MS they are a student but uses Excel in their business.
The train analogy is backward, would you intentionally buy a ticket to a more expensive destination if your intention were to get off early?
Doing what the author says will get you banned from the airline. If you don't fly the itinerary listed, they will tear it up in front of your face as it's in the terms and conditions.
My point: there's no real secret - the sites like Kayak and any ITA-based search product are pretty much doing so many creative things to minimize the price that it's rare to find an exception without cheating.
Finally, the pricing is crazy, but being in the tornado there's a method to the madness.
I once bought a ticket from Vancouver to London (UK) on Air Canada. Turns out I could have saved over $200 by flying via the same airline out of Seattle and connecting back in Vancouver to the exact same flight going on to London. Absurd.
As another example, Des Moines to Dallas as discussed in this article. American has the only non-stop flights between those two cities, and any connection is going to add at least 2 hours to your travel time (based on a quick glance). On the other hand, nobody has a nonstop between Des Moines and Los Angeles, so American has no competitive advantage there and cannot command a huge price premium.
Or do you want them to lower the price of the Newark to Paris trip so that it sells out early and people who would have been willing to pay $1400 for that trip can't get to where they want to go?
They didn't, that means adding an extra flight might have been a lot more expensive. (due to, e.g. regulation limiting the number of planes in that route).
But it's probably not good business, since people get irritated by things like that and shop less.
Amazon.com has the lowest prices of them all. Its usually cheaper, and faster, for me to order books and gifts from the US site, pay international shipping and customs than it is to order from the local site, who may not get it for months if at all.
Before the rise of all the internet discount travel sites, travel agents earned their keep by doing all this for you.
For better or for worse, that world changed over time. People would come into the agency, sit down for 1 to 2 hours to gather advice and information... then when it came time to book, they'd say somethign to the effect of "well I can book it myself online and save 15%". (Then he'd lose the sale).
That or they'd come in, grab one of his travel brochures then book online.
I'm not trying to bemoan anything here. He did well with the agency for a number of years and sold out to someone at the end who picked up the 'business travel' (where agents still earn commissions for doing it all for you). Just trying to shed a bit of light on the story from my real life observation of the travel industry.
Anyways, kinda interesting way the world has changed.
(edit, oh ... I don't think his travel agents ever advised hopping off mid-journey, but then I think they knew how to book it so you'd not have to do that.)
I know you can usually do it by googling for a string of text from the article body, but without an extract from the article body there's no way to do that from here.
And I'm assuming bugmenot no longer works in the post-paywall world, right?
edit: Never mind, I found it by googling "how to beat high airfares" (which I thought wouldn't work). Turns out it's a Nate Silver article and quite interesting. The trick is that sometimes you can get to a hub airport more cheaply by booking a flight to some destination on the other side of the hub and then just getting off the plane... but of course the more people start using this trick (after it's published in the New York Times) the less useful it will be.
IIRC, if you use private browsing mode on most browsers, doesn't it defeat the paywall?
I'm going on a trip next week. About three weeks ago a round trip 2-hour flight trip was $250, a week later it was $350, but I found a 6-hour round-trip flight (that overshoots my destination, has me wait a while, then backtracks) for $256.
I check fares one month ago - $599. Two weeks ago - $549. Yesterday - $499.
Tulsa to DC.
Re: when to purchase a ticket, Farecast (now owned by Bing) was the best predictor I've seen.
I priced out EWR->SFO and United/Continental had a direct flight for $369. Maybe I'm the aberration but I think NYT should have done a few more case studies before publishing their results.
So, for example, say you're trying to fly to Chicago (ORD). The article's point is that it may be cheaper to buy an EWR-ORD-STL ticket, because there's actually more price competition when flying to St. Louis.
Every time I have looked, a single one-way is more expensive than a round-trip between the same locations. Maybe I've just been 'lucky'.
Edit: no, I'm just ignorant. Turns out domestic one-ways are more proportionally priced versus round-trips.
To wit: when switching in Kayak or Hipmunk from roundtrip to one-way and vice versa, the fares roughly or exactly match what you'd expect from decomposing/recomposing the parts.
This was hardly ever the case in the past when using the airlines own portals, or Web 1.0 aggregators.
It takes 2 tanks of gas each way (about a 350 mile trip, 20 miles per gallon, 15 gallons per tank). The gas cost alone is close to $240. Even if you managed to burn 3 tanks instead of 4 during the trip, you're talking 45 gallons @ $4 a gallon, which is $180... and that's just gas.
The tolls are around $20 each way. So, now you're up to $220. And what about food? Add another $20 or so. More maybe.
So, now it costs the same to drive as it does to fly. And that's not even factoring in the cost of your TIME. It takes about 7 hours to drive from DC to Boston. It takes just over 1 hour by plane. Even factoring in the airport wait and transport, you're doing better... and you can do stuff while the plane flies while you can't do anything while you're driving. And then there's traffic. And the wear and tear on your vehicle.
And this is for a relatively short trip.
So, is driving really economically better? I did the math. I did the trip. It often doesn't make sense. Do the math yourself. Only for short trips does driving beat the cost of flying, and in which case, why you would be flying anyways? On the east coast, I just take the train or a bus. $20 gets you from DC to New York. Another $15 gets you to Boston. You can't beat THAT.
So, the cost of gas has completely changed the economics and argument of drive vs. fly. Flying is almost always going to be cheaper, if you can book your flight early enough to get the discounted fares.
That would be 17.5 gallons each way, not 30. The round trip is then 35 gallons, which should easily be less than three 15-gallon tanks. Even 450 miles each way fits in three tanks.
Only for short trips does driving beat the cost of flying
I don't know how much you can stick to highways on that DC-Boston route, but when I drive down to visit my parents, each way is 400 miles on 15 gallons. Even at $4.50 per gallon (and I'd likely pay a fair bit less than that after the return trip), I spend half as much on gas as I'd spend on air fare. Then there's the cost of transit to and from the airports (which I'd get hit with again in the too-likely event of a flight cancellation). I'm not sure I'd count eating as a cost advantage for flying: I can pack a lunch in the car if I want to eat cheap. The only advantages of flying are saving three hours of travel time in each direction and having a couple more hours when I don't have to pay attention to anything in particular (I can read or sleep instead of watching the road).
Next time you do the trip - calculate the cost. You'll see it's closer to the best airfare you can get on that route than you might think.
If you prefer to fully-load the airport commute and wait time, then you can equalize the time cost. And then you'll be comparing the actual costs against the benefits. I've found that the driving cost even not factoring in time and food / other stuff, is remarkably close to the airfare.
And don't forget the tolls. That adds close to $40. Blame the NJ Turnpike for much of that.
You've ignored the costs (both monetary and opportunity) of renting a vehicle or using public transit while in the destination city as opposed to having your own vehicle there. You've also ignored the potential harm of being confined to a cabin with scores of people who might be carrying airborne pathogens. You haven't considered the emotional cost of being subjected to an invasive search at the airport, or the stress of getting to your gate on-time.
To be clear, I am not anti-flying. I just think it's a sad state of affairs when it's more economically rational for a single individual to drive 450 miles each way than it is to fly. Get a more efficient car, add another person or two, require some bags, or plan an extended stay, and anywhere within a 12-to-24-hour driving radius becomes an economically irrational flight.
Traveling with a family on a fairly short / medium-haul trip (no overnight stay necessary) with lots of baggage? Driving will trump airfare costs for certain.
In the case of trains, it depends very much on where you are and where you're going. For example flying between basically any two European capital cities is almost always cheaper than taking the train.
Pretty screwed up priorities if you ask me.