United Wants to Sell Your Seat to Someone Else for More Money | Hacker News Reader

United Wants to Sell Your Seat to Someone Else for More Money

bloomberg.com

26 pointskuusisto15 comments

So the airline can auction off seats EVEN BEFORE THE FLIGHT IS FULL and force feed you their $250 voucher? If it happens to me one time, that's the last time I fly with that airline. In this day and age, why can't they just fly planes with constant ticket prices? Makes it easy for consumers and less sophisticated for the airlines. As a side-effect avoid some PR disasters..

Because that's a huge revenue loss. The basic problem is that the MUST have the planes full if they're going to make any money at all. Once the plane is full, they want to charge as much as possible for each seat. This system let's them move low-fare passengers to empty seats on other flights to make room for high-fare passengers on full flights.

"MUST have the planes full if they're going to make any money".

But, we're talking about bumping passengers off a planes that is already full. The passenger already for a ticket on a plane that is full. Now, they're getting kicked out because of pure greed to make more money by the airline. I'd still be pissed.

It's like Jerry seinfeld said. "You know how to take a reservation, but don't know how to hold a reservation."

The simple flaw with almost all of these arguments is that if you don't show up, you still pay the price of the ticket. Therefore the airline makes a profit in not having to handle your luggage or anything else while still taking your money.

you would have to opt in. And presumably if they have to pay you a $250 voucher, the person buying your seat would be paying $250+ more for your seat that you were. That's probably fairly rare

>that's probably fairly rare.

No, it isn't. Ticket prices fluctuate incredibly wildly, and tend to increase sharply in the month leading up to the flight. In fact, this move is largely to displace overbooking to a new mechanic.

Now why this is a problem: Want to book a necessary flight 3 months ahead of time, shop for the cheapest fare, amd then find out a week before your trip that you've been bumped to a later flight (posssibly missing scheduled activities) because a last minute customer wants your seat? Unoversal adoption of United's model would make this common place (at least as common-place as overbooking is now).

Or the seat you're moving to would normally cost $250 less.

If it didn't matter when I got there, why would I be flying? The airports strike me as less pleasant than the old Greyhound stations I remember from forty years ago, and the seats on the planes aren't as good as the seats on the buses.

What I wrote when I had to justify taking a plane for business travel: "Destination is on a different continent". Sometimes you have no choice

But yeah, especially when there is high-speed rail as an alternative, airplanes aren't always the best option.

Seems like United is increasingly positioning themselves as the airline for people who don't care whether they make it to their destination.

Malaysia airlines will be hard to beat.

In that case, United is just like UDP.

United Datagram Plane.

But fast as they use the back plane

Air travel continues to really impress with its ability to get worse.

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