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Comment by CaptainZapp | Hacker News Reader

That's quite common within Europe, where a ticket from Warsaw to Zurich can be significantly cheaper than into the other direction.

In this case it makes a modicum of sense. Chalk it up to differences in purchasing power.

  I waited a few days, and re-ticketed again, and the price dropped from $1690 to $1463 - so that's also odd.

Not really. Airline pricing is very much based on mathematical models. When the system determines that the flight won't be sold for $1690 it lowers the price.

The trick is to fill every seat on the plane as expensively as possible, but not to leave any empty seats. Check out this article for details https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yield_management .

In principle: There is no product going stale faster than an empty seat on a plane after the doors close.

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Their goal is to maximize income, not fill seats. If it was the last flight they'd ever fly, you'd expect the price of an empty seat to converge to zero (or well, the cost of the fuel to lift a person and their baggage above the clouds) as the gates close, but you also have to keep the price expectation high for the customers silently haggling with the online ticketing system for a better price.

OT: it drives me crazy that yield management is not applied to events. If you have only sold half the tickets for your concert, reduce the remaining tickets. hn, do something!

If they did yield management properly at events which tend to sell out they'd also be able to capture ticket scalpers' potential profits rather than attempting overly elaborate ID schemes to prevent ticket resale. Not sure that many people would be thankful for higher ticket prices, but some of them might prefer that rather than having to buy tickets within an hour of them going on sale via a booking platform that struggles to cope with the traffic spike.

I used to work for a ticketing company. I know some Major League Baseball teams were making efforts at "dynamic pricing" which was basically yield management. Some ticket brokers do this as well.

> where a ticket from Warsaw to Zurich can be significantly cheaper than into the other direction. In this case it makes a modicum of sense. Chalk it up to differences in purchasing power.

Not just that. Everyone wants to be in Greece in August, not many people want to be in London.

Unless they're staying the whole month or the period is bracketed by major discontinuities, it isn't clear how that preference is relevant. A round trip is at least two flights. Why should the order of them matter?

Demand.

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