This is a small world. The US has something like ten major airlines. Eight if you don't count subsidiaries. Someone at the first one made a decision to embrace an exploitative pricing model. And then, someone at the second airline looked at this and thought to themselves, "you know, we're not gonna organize a PR campaign to stigmatize it, we're gonna try the same".
The rest, such as Frontier, JetBlue, Southwest, Allegiant - are all discount and/or regional airlines.
For example, allegiant flies to most cities secondary airports that are 1-2 hours drive from the city.
EDIT: It's really 4 equally large ones by passenger miles:
* 1 Delta Air Lines 17.8%
* 2 American Airlines 17.5%
* 3 Southwest Airlines 17.3%
* 4 United Airlines 16.0%
The rest are sub 10%
To your edit, Alaska is something like 9.9%. Technically below 10%, but barely.
If you're already on the east coast and aren't going to the west coast, then Alaska doesn't have a route. So I suppose they are "regional", where the region is about 70% of the country rather than all of it.
So yes, still a regional airline if your home base isn't exactly on the west coast.
why?
given "Airline tickets were more expensive"
I specifically mentioned the price as the one metric that has improved. And it's a pretty important metric! But not the only one.
Worse than when the government set, not just the maximum, but also the minimum price an airline could charge for a ticket? You're saying that time, when price competition was literally illegal, was better than today?
Is there any chance that you're not actually old enough to remember that time?
What, pray tell, is the advantage of competition when the competitors are forced by the government to charge the same price for the same route? And not just forced to charge the same price, oh no! But forced to charge a price higher than railroads (which cost more to operate than airlines), so as not to outcompete railroads, which are both slower and more expensive to operate.
It's like getting mad at your cat for killing a bird - it's just what cats do.
The answer to this behavior isn't being mad at or boycotting particular airlines, it is regulation.
Or, you know…accept that a cat is a cat, and stop trying to regulate scratching simply because you don’t like it.
(I get that you probably understand this, but the “regulation is the solution” is kind of a leap. People whining about efficient market pricing have always struck me as just fundamentally misunderstanding what capitalism is.)
And I have actually heard "if you hate it, you should have asked the regulators to stop me from doing it" from a techie, and man... no. You have agency. You own this. If you need a regulator to stop you, you're not a good person, sorry. The market didn't make you do this. You just felt that it absolved you.
In other words, modern airlines gouge certain customers, but effectively subsidize others. I would be unambiguously outraged only if they were gouging everyone and making fat stacks.
It's a failure of customer protections laws. The same service legally should cost each customer the same. Sophisticated pricing schemes should be just plainly illegal.
You can't put an item in the store on the shelf and charge every customer what you like. You have to put up a price and adhere to that price regardless of who wants to buy. Anything else is illegal. Or at least should be.
>> For most of human history, you had to haggle over prices before you could buy something. The Quakers were among the first people to commit to fixed prices — and they did it because it was good morals. Turned out, it was also good business. This is the strange story of the long journey of that little piece of paper.[0]
Seems maybe this is just getting back to haggling, except where the seller has an unfair advantage, and we are trying to eke back a somewhat fair playing field using AI.
It could end up that (maybe wishful thinking), if enough people do it, United Airlines banning AI booking agents may lose them enough business they will need to cut prices or invite in AI agents.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/28/589278258/plan...
Negotiating a price is as old as humans. "That merchant over there is charging 10% less. Can you beat that?", "I want to buy 10 of these, can you give me a bulk discount?"
I have friends that haggle at local stores. One goes does the "Store X is cheaper thing". Another does "My parents live in Oregon where they're is no sales tax, can you lower your price to cover the difference? Otherwise I'll just have them bring it down from Oregon", etc....
Where is the sympathy for me? Why do only large corporations get to use the "competition" excuse?
But anyhow, you see the problem.
Look up food deserts. I'm sure there are myriad issues you think exist only in North Korea.
They are saying the biggest problem with the poor communities you're talking about is the people living in them. That seems true statistically no? Or at least, there's more data that supports that than the idea that there's magic soil in the rich communities.
Are we going to pretend like communities aren't shaped by their people now and everybody is just NPCs that has no influence over what their communities look like?
We can at least rule out that poor people can't make good communities because there are plenty of counterexamples that show otherwise.
Or perhaps it’s simply not a functioning competitive market in the first place, for a variety of reasons including obvious ones like large barriers to entry.