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Comment by uptrails | Hacker News Reader

This is such a pervasive argument also used to justify a lot of bad stuff in tech ("if we don't do it, our competitors will" / "if you don't like it, you should have asked the regulators to stop me").

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".

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My point is that it's totally unclear to me that that's how this happened. There were at least a few airlines that did not say "we're gonna try the same", such as People Express Airlines and ValuJet, which explicitly tried to market themselves as fair, cheap, and transparently priced. Those airlines don't exist anymore. They went out of business, mostly because the other airlines used sophisticated pricing schemes to sabotage them. Maybe this was a failure of antitrust. It's certainly much more complicated than "all the airlines colluded together". Given the fact that the surviving airlines were never able to reach a particularly profitable "recoupment phase" of the predatory pricing process, it seems that this did not actually result in unfair prices on average (although business customers obviously get shafted every time).

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.

> Maybe this was a failure of antitrust.

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.

This reminds me that flat pricing is a relatively new invention

>> 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...

I'd argue there's only three "major" carriers: American, United, and Delta.

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%

Southwest and Alaska are absolutely major carriers. Not the absolute largest perhaps but major. Alaska is certainly not discount, and despite the name is not particularly regional.

To your edit, Alaska is something like 9.9%. Technically below 10%, but barely.

The Alaskan problem is they more often have unique routes. Which is great and serves cool stuff, but you can’t always count on it bringing competition to your main flight. Allegiant is similar.

If you're in the western half of the country, Alaska is essentially always a route for wherever you want to go, whether staying west or going east.

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.

You don't have to go to the east coast to have trouble finding them. In St Louis they have a whole 4 flights, and 3 go to the west coast. So yes, absolutely regional. And that's the western side of the midwest. In comparison, Southwest has 55 direct destinations from the same airport. This isn't cherry picking: You have as sparse a route map from Dallas, yet another non trivial city. From there, Southwest has 70+ direct flights.

So yes, still a regional airline if your home base isn't exactly on the west coast.

Which is actually worse than the regulated airlines were before Jimmy Carter deregulated them. When prices were uniformly set by the government, there were 11 "trunk" airlines in 1978, 9 regional airlines, and three unregulated intrastate airlines- one was Southwest (flying just in Texas, the other two, Air California and PSA, were just in California). Those 23 airlines are now down basically to the Big 4 plus 3 little ones (Alaska, Jet Blue, Frontier). Airline tickets were more expensive- well, the prices were about the same number of dollars but thanks to inflation that's a lot less buying power.

> Which is actually worse

why?

given "Airline tickets were more expensive"

I meant just in terms of number of airlines, we are worse off. Oh, and service quality. And comfort in flight. (Ignoring things that changed in the rest of society: in 1978 all flights had smoking sections!)

I specifically mentioned the price as the one metric that has improved. And it's a pretty important metric! But not the only one.

You can still get service, comfort, and quality on modern airlines - you just have to pay the 2026 equivalent of a 1977 coach ticket. And I'll bet today's first class is better than yesteryear's coach.

Free markets compete, it's what they do.

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.

> 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 market pricing have always struck me as just fundamentally misunderstanding what capitalism is.)

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