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Comment by tempsy | Hacker News Reader

ironically airfares are one of the most transparently priced services in the whole country because Obama passed a law that forced them to show the final price with fees and taxes included in the list price when searching

pretty much no other good or service in the US can say the same

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They're transparent in the sense that they tell you the cost and it's the same when you checkout 5 minutes later.

But calling it "transparently priced" is nonsense. Fares change based on multiple variables. The fact that getting the lowest fare means navigating the permutations of date of travel, date of purchase and location of purchase to find the lowest combination of the three can be maddening. I shouldn't need a VPN and a comprehensive understanding of airline pricing quirks to not get overcharged, often by significant amounts. And it shouldn't be possible to get a lower price by using airline points as an intermediate currency, especially since the aggregators do not list the cost for flights in points.

not sure what you think should happen. there’s a limited number of seats per flight. if there’s 10 available seats left and 8 suddenly booked why should the last ones be priced the same

Some the variables should be illegal, though. A seat should cost the same whether I'm buying it from my computer in California or Lima, Peru. And the kind of travel hacking that allows someone to purchase 100k points to buy a seat using points for less than it would cost to purchase the same seat with cash should also be regulated away.

A 2-dimensional search is much easier to navigate than a 4-dimensional search. Aggregators have searches based on flexible dates. And they could combine them with Camelizer-style watching of fares to alert people when they get cheaper as well as providing historical averages. But as soon as you start throwing in more variables, it stops being possible to make sense of it all.

But also:

> if there’s 10 available seats left and 8 suddenly booked why should the last ones be priced the same

You could say the same about any product. What if a grocery store applied the same policy when it came to milk? What if Apple charged more for iPhones when a store was running low? What if a gas station charged more based on the level of their storage tanks? You don't think there'd be outrage if we started to see these airline pricing practices seep into the larger market?

Is there outrage when a clothes store puts the items they haven't been able to shift onto the sales rack? Is there outrage when a grocery store puts discount stickers on the food that's approaching its sell by date? Dynamic pricing is a fact of life in very many sectors.

Because raising prices just because you don't have many left is price gouging. Turns out people don't like being charged more money for no reason than "fuck you, that's why".

The hidden motivation there is that the government's rule benefits the government. It's easier for them to raise their taxes and fees, by hiding their portion in the total price where they won't get blamed. (You can find the breakdown if you look for it, but who ever bothers.)

Gasoline?

"Pretty much" implying there are exceptions, yes, but it's not the norm in the US for list prices to be inclusive of all fees and taxes.

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