Just tried it myself with SEA to MSP (hopping off on a SEA->MSP->DFW route) on July 15th. Direct flight is $230, hop-off route is $150 on exactly the same Delta plane.
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.
This is really just a variant of the back-to-back ticket trick, which the airlines already have some countermeasures for. In particular: when you don't get on the MSP->DFW leg, any other ticket you had on the same itinerary gets cancelled. When you show up for your 1W MSP->SEA, they may ask you (annoyed) questions. I used to do back-to-backs (I had to fly DTW->LGA a lot) and they did hassle me about it.
You obviously will have trouble checking baggage doing this, too.
This is unethical, basically he calls for jumping off of flights at layovers, which violates the terms of the ticket. There's even a security issue for the airlines, because they need to check if your bags are flying unaccompanied.
Ironic that the NYT cracks down on people evading its paywall but is selling content on doing the same for air travel.
Is this any more unethical than ordering a #6 combo at McDonald's and not eating the fries... just because you calculated that for some reason the drink + sandwich cost more than the #6? Even if McDonald's put in big bold letter, "You must eat everything you order or else"?
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.
It is the same kind of "unethical" as deliberately buying and throwing away food; it's just a large difference of degree.
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.
No, because ethically, not liking the way somebody prices a good or service doesn't give you a free pass to abuse other consumers of those goods or services.
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.
I'm still not sure why it's a big deal if I get off a plane at a stop, but getting off a train isn't a big deal.
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.
You're changing the subject. It can be both bad that airline pricing isn't transparent and bad to exploit it to reduce your own fares at the expense of everyone else on the same route.
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.
It's a big deal because you are signaling your intention to to fly to destination C, not B, when in fact your hidden intention is only to go to B. This is called lying. Try telling them the truth, either by buying the single A->B flight or by telling the check-in clerk that you have no intention of flying to C, and you won't get the good price and may get banned from the airline.
Again, for some reason no other form of transit seems to really care. Even if you tell them about it. What other businesses do this (really strange) practice? I can buy the entire Microsoft Office and only use Excel and Microsoft doesn't care.
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 concept the airlines are employing is called market segmentation. It's legal and they have the right to do it. The concept you seem to be referencing is some generic measure of product utilization.
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?
This guy was modded down, but are there ethical issues? If I'm booked through from SFO to DFW to MIA and I vanish at DFW, they're going to be calling my name over the PA system and trying to figure out whether or not to hold the DFW-MIA flight. This is especially true if my SFO-DFW leg is delayed -- my vanishing act might well wind up holding up a planeload of people as the airline figures out what the hell has happened to me and whether they should send the flight off to MIA (and then have to book me on a DFW-MIA plane later in the day) or hold it a few more minutes on the assumption that I'm currently dashing across the terminal to try and make it onboard.
Ya there are. I've had planes take off fairly delayed because of folks doing just this. We just sit there as the airline tries to reconcile why the number of checked-in passengers doesn't match their passenger count.
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...)
A lot of people already see traveling as a big hassle and they feel they have been nickel-and-dimed by the airlines (no more hot meals like back in the day), they are groped and blasted with X-rays by TSA as if they are some tiny terrorists. (This is regardless that there are 2 separate entities involved, people see it as just one traveling experience).
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.
The article has an example of saving $189 (about 50% of the published price of the ticket in question), and a post in this thread had an example of saving 500 euro on a transatlantic flight. So it's not always trivial amount of money.
How many man-minutes of inconvenience are you willing to create for random strangers for every dollar you can save for yourself?
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.
"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?
Intent of the hypothetical, addressing its parent's thought about moral relativism, clearly supposes that you are inconveniencing people for monetary gain without possibility of compensating or otherwise being able to undo that.
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.
Yes, but if you base your life on those sorts of hypotheticals you can never do anything.
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.
At least in NYC, the pedestrian crossing buttons have no effect on the traffic lights. They computerized the traffic grid and them pesky pedestrians screw up the flow. So you can push all you want, but it wont speed things up.
> 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 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?
To be fair... money has different value to different people. I doubt any billionaires would care to waste 10 minutes of other people's time to save much money, because money doesn't have that much value to them. On the other hand, college students that eat lots of ramen are already valuing money more than their own health, so it seems natural that they'd place far more value on the money, even if they place the same value on other 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
On the contrary, I think college students are the ones that don't care about money.
No, he's clearly arguing that the billionaire is more rational with his money. Even though the marginal value is higher for the college student, that student is not as smart might not even see the opportunity for monetary gain.
So with a Full boeing 747 (probably a large overestimate), that's about 366 people (with wikipedia as source). At 10 minutes you're wasting 61 man hours (did I make a mistake? That seems way too large). Taking a low estimate on the value of people's time of about $10 per hour, you should be saving $610 to justify it...
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).
Sadly this is the attitude that some people really have. And if challenged on it, they'll rationalize it by blaming the airline for setting their prices that way.
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!"
In both cases they are right too: the people creating the messed-up market (government via drug laws) and (airlines via schedules) are creating incentives that have built-in externalities.
I agree with both of you. I'm not entirely sure where that leaves me. Conflicted. On the one hand I fully agree that these markets are kind of silly and incentivize dickish behavior. On the other hand, both the drug users and the time-wasters are knowingly inflicting those evils upon the world and other people through their own behavior.
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.
A potential solution to this is to hand your boarding pass for the next leg to a gate agent as you get off the plane at your intended destination and say that you will not be boarding. The gate agent may threaten you with consequences, but there's really nothing they can do; it's not like the TSA is going to force you on to a plane.
No ethical issue-- as kulkarnic said, why not just tell the gate agent, "I'm sorry, I can't fly on the final leg of this flight. Here's my boarding pass."
I don't think interfering with someone's business model is inherently unethical. While intentionally booking a flight this way deprives the airline of some opportunities to make money, not boarding the next flight doesn't deprive them of anything. In fact, it saves them a bit on fuel and may even open up a seat on an overbooked flight, saving the airline from paying compensation that usually exceeds the ticket price.
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.
Yet again the word ethics comes up when consumers attempt to act in their own best interest in a given marketplace. Why should it be ethics when it's just economics? The airline isn't chastised for being unethical when they make decisions in their economic interest, why should the consumer be?
Whilst I agree with the principle, I think the argument runs quite simply:
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.
When you buy the ticket you also expect a seat on the plane, but the airline has absolutely no problem with massively overselling a flight and bumping some people because, hey -- nothing personal, just economics!
Why should customers show the airlines any more courtesy than they are shown by the airlines in such matters?
Because two wrongs doesn't make a right and because the terms you agree to allows the airline to overbook giving you a lower fare in return (at least some business class fares guarantee you a seat).
Not so. The specific tactic the NYC recommends is questionable, but it is possible to surrender your boarding pass for the onward flight. (Say you no longer want to fly: there's nothing they can do to stop you).
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.
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!
Why are ethics and morality being discussed in the context of business? They have their pricing strategy, I have mine. It's my travel money, let me do what I want.
Nobody who is commenting here cares (or I strongly suspect they don't care) about the Airlines and people making money. It's the hundred or so people who are sitting on the airplane that are being inconvenienced - possibly missing their own connections later on, that our concerns are for.
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.
I agree that's one concern, but it's not entirely clear to me what the division of responsibility for those waiting-around passengers is. You might blame the passengers causing the problem, but as a passenger I also expect the airline to anticipate and work around any frequent sources of disruption. If it's something that happens often enough to actually be a problem, then it's an operational problem and they should find some way to mitigate it. For example, they could include it as a factor when evaluating pricing strategies (the likely operations-disrupting effect of certain pricing strategies), or perhaps they could handle check-in and luggage-tracking differently, or they could police their fare rules more stringently to more strongly discourage 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.
In the 15 years I've been flying actively, i've only once been on a plane where I was told to return to my seat so they could do a count. I'm presuming that was a situation where someone hopped off mid travel. So, this is really a rare scenario. I think most people who do this are savvy, which means they realize they are about to screw an entire planeload of people - so it's a fairly rare endeavor.
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.
Oh, yeah, I didn't even realize the other one happens. I've never had a connection where I didn't have to get off the plane, and usually I have to change planes. I think maybe once out of hundreds of flights have I got lucky enough that the connecting plane was actually the same plane I came in on. So I assumed the hidden-city ticketing was just people skipping the 2nd connecting flight, not literally exiting the plane at a layover.
Then it's a failure of the pricing strategy, developed by the airline itself, if it encourages people to make a rational choice that delays or affects other passengers.
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.
"they need to check if your bags are flying unaccompanied"
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).
I've only ever had a handful of connections where I'm on the same plane. More often, I have to haul my stuff halfway across the terminal (and the Availability heuristic* tells me that it's almost never the next gate over) to get on a different plane. Thus, if they never scan my boarding pass, they can be pretty sure my luggage isn't on the plane.
The times I've had a multi-leg flight (internationally), it's always been the same plane. The airline still makes everyone get off, bring in new clean blankets and pillows, and ensure that no one left anything behind. Feels a bit annoying when you just go back to the same seat, but I understand why.
The unethical part is in willfully entering into a contract that you know in advance you are not going to uphold. Feel free to not enter the contract - but don't lie to get part of the benefit, and then sneak out of the rest.
Isn't it unethical to create this scenario in the first place? Charging people more to travel a shorter distance than a longer distance on the same route. It just doesn't seem logical in any sense. Perhaps the coverage in NYT will force the airlines to clean up their act.
Not allowing unintented bags is one step to prevent bombings. The answer to your question ("Who would check a bag to some city they're never going to?") is "someone who is trying to blow up the plane."
What's unethical is the pricing behavior of the airlines, not taking advantage of the hidden-city phenomenon, which exists because certain routes, though longer, are immune to airline price-gouging on account of a fair market.
I have used this strategy twice, to get off at ORD while buying tickets till MKE. Both times I have approached airlines representatives to let them know that I will not be taking the last leg to save other passengers the inconvenience of waiting. Both times I have been told politely that I will be considered a no-show and it doesn't matter and they refuse to notify the boarding gate.
I worked for airlines and one of the big 3 for many years. They have complex algorithms that try to determine the lowest price. They're competitive, and want to be the cheapest they can. They're not trying to "hide" any prices.
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.
For Canadians you can add government fees, regulations and lesser competition to the reasons this occurs.
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.
A couple days a found a round-trip flight from Montreal to Paris with a layover in New Jersey for $762. I tried to book the exact some flight, but starting in New Jersey, and it was over $1,400. This sort of this is crazy. Is anyone really surprised that airlines keep going bankrupt?
Its not that crazy when you look into it more. Montreal to Paris is a low yielding route filled mostly with price-conscious tourists. New York to Paris has, as a percentage, substantially more business travel, which can sustain higher fares. For each route, the airline (presumably Continental) is trying to extract what it sees as the maximum price the market is willing to bear.
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.
Based on the principle of charging the maximum price the market is willing to bear, would you consider it ethical for a company like Amazon to charge more or less based on the affluence of the billing zipcode for each customer? /honest question
OK, knowing this strategy employed by the seller, a buyer opened a PO Box at a near by less-than-affluent neighborhood and shipped her purchase there. Would you categorize this customer's behavior unethical?
They basically do this by country code. I find Amazon.de is cheaper for some a lot of things than Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.
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.
There are a lot of merchants on Amazon.com (the US site) that won't ship internationally. But you can still buy from them and get international shipping if you use a package forwarding service. Try http://bit.ly/gN2oGK You can save a ton of money for exactly the reasons you mentioned: prices on the US site are much cheaper, even with international shipping.
I think it would be ethical, although bad business. Both price discrimination methods, by the way, are defeatable. You can drive an extra few hours to another airport (have done this many times), and you can get your packages shipped to another address.
That makes sense, but you could argue that there is a cost associated with upsetting and frustrating your customers that maybe the airlines aren't taking into consideration. Something can't be right with their models if they are going bankrupt again and again.
Would you prefer that they raised the prices of the Montreal to Paris trip so that you can pay more?
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?
False dichotomy. If there are really that many people who want to fly EWR->CDG, but don't due to cost considerations, the airlines will add more flights to fill extra demand caused by lower prices.
If they can charge that much, "theoretically" it means they would make more money adding an extra flight on that route.
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).
In any industry, price is not derived from cost. The market sets the price, irrespective of cost, which is why companies go bankrupt, especially airlines.
Funny thing, my Father used to own a travel agency. This is exactly the sort of thing that travel agents were paid to know AND search for.
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.)
Sigh. Is there any reliable way to read nytimes articles without having an account, nowadays?
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.
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.
Yup, there's not a distinct correlation between buying early and getting the best price. Sometimes the best price doesn't show up until a week before the departure. Sometimes the best price is attained when purchasing months prior to departure. The only thing you can bet on is that the cheapest fares are usually attained when you fly out on a Wednesday. Monday flights are more expensive as it's typically for business travelers, and Friday/Saturday flights are expensive as well because of vacationers. If you can fly to your destination on a Wednesday instead of a few days later, you'll usually save a bunch of money.
Re: when to purchase a ticket, Farecast (now owned by Bing) was the best predictor I've seen.
I just tried the following route - EWR->DES->SFO on 6/10 and returning on 6/18 via the same route back. The price each way was ~$420 (which included 2 layovers).
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.
I think you got it backwards. The trick works when you're ending your trip in a hub -- you take the first leg, but skip the connection.
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.
If your name is even remotely "exotic" (and mine seems to be), good luck checking in online - apparently one way tickets trigger some alarm in the depths of DHS.
That is true. And that basically tells us how stupid and ridiculous our security theater is. Someone planning to blow themselves up will supposedly save a couple of hundreds dollars in order to attract attention to themselves by buying a one-way ticket.
My sense is that this has improved a lot recently, perhaps as a side-effect of trying to stay competitive in the travel-planning portals that can stitch together itineraries from multiple carriers.
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.
At $4 a gallon, I might even challenge that. I recently calculated the cost of driving from DC to Boston, which is regularly a $240 or so ROUNDTRIP on many airlines.
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).
In my case, I need to refill my 15 gallon tank 3 times for the whole roundtrip. So, my best case is 45 gallons, which at $4/gal is $180. It's true I'm left with some gas at the end, so perhaps that skews the calculation. If I could refill it with just enough, I could shave some bucks. But I prefer not to return home on empty fumes.
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.
Why are you calculating based on number of tanks of fuel used when you can instead calculate the exact number of gallons? Obviously you have some fuel left when you get home; that doesn't count as part of the cost of travel because you'll then use it in your normal course of affairs.
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.
It would be tough to beat trains and buses, though.
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.
True, driving a family of four anywhere in the US is almost always cheaper than flying. And trains, not so much in the US unless you happen to have a fairly direct route. Omaha to Denver by train is OK, Topeka to Denver, nearly the same distance for practical purposes, but to take the train you have to go to Chicago then to Omaha, then to Denver.
Yes - and if you have lots of baggage too. Something to consider.
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.
I'm not sure about trains. I actually looked into this, getting a train from Tuscaloosa to Las Vegas. The two cheapest round trip train tickets were more than twice the price of a round trip plane ticket. Also, both train routes took four days, both of which involved a bus ride on the last day. That's not to mention both train routes going through Chicago. It was crazy.
Once had a flight from Omaha to Evansville through St. Louis. At the gate in St. Louis the airline informed us that the flight was being canceled so they put us (10 passengers in all) in a van and drove us to the Evansville airport, dropped us off, and the driver drove away. The airport was closed! The only pay phone you could see was on the other side of locked doors! This was long enough ago that most of the passengers didn't have cell phones.
I don't disagree, but to be fair about the time, there's at least an hour in the DC airport and at least half an hour in the Boston airport, and that's assuming there are no delays on either tarmac due to planes being in the way of your gate or your plane needing something inspected or replaced. So it's more like 2.5-3 hours vs. 7 hours. Still probably worth the flight, depending on how much you like driving, but I think most people think only about the actual flying time, rather than the total time spent dealing with the airport process.
What's wrong with paying pilots and airline workers a decent wage? Beating high costs of some consumer goods and services is reasonable, but must we 'nickel and dime' trained professionals who safely transport your loved ones?
You do realize that by doing this technique you're not physically taking money out of airline pilots' wallets, right? Airlines already screw over pilots (WSJ says average starting salary for a commercial airline pilot is ~$30k) so I don't think this technique will really impact wages of airline employees either way.
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.