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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

If the airlines know that most of tickets for a flight have been sold via Google, then what's to stop the airlines from drastically dropping the price of the last ticket just to cost Google a ton of money? There's no way this could work if the airlines were in a legitimately adversarial relationship with Google.

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Even better, have the airlines themselves buy up the tickets via Google. Then drop the price to nearly 0 on the last ticket. Then release the tickets for sale back to the public. Instead of just hurting Google, now, the airline has basically gotten to sell a whole plane's worth of tickets twice.

Then sell them back to google again, rinse and repeat until whatever regulatory body with a real hammer gets pissed off.

A) Why would they be in an adversarial relationship with Google? B) What benefit do they get from doing something like this?

The airlines are in a very adversarial relationship with Google. They're scared that google will take away their direct distribution channel by being better than they are.

So adversarial they spend tons of money on advertising and pay Google to use ITA's software to sell tickets to their own customers.

They dont have a choice about advertising. If they don’t advertise, users will see an ota or metasearch link and click on that instead. Then the airline pays a GDS commission and makes less money

If most tickets for that airline come from Google then that airline has little incentive to burn Google with its pricing practices.

They definitely have an incentive to take advantage of Google. If an airline regularly drops the price, and Google keeps refunding the price difference out of their own pockets, word will get out. People are going to preferentially book on that airline, knowing that the day before the flight they're going to get a big rebate.

That brand loyalty will remain even if Google kicks them off of their platform. Moreover, as more airlines get kicked off, Google is left with a smaller and smaller subset of airlines it is brokering tickets for.

But... why? Google is refunding passengers, not the airlines. The airline already sold an expensive ticket thanks to Google.

Why in the world would you attack a business partner that brings you customers in such a strange way?

Airlines run on razor thin margins now. If they believe that people in the future will know where they want to fly and will search for tickets wherever tickets are sold (see Southwest) and they can get a bunch of free advertising and sell some expensive tickets by burning Google, I think they'd at least consider doing it.

Combined profit margin for all US airlines was a touch above 6% in 2018. But that was still $11.8 billion in profit.

https://www.bts.gov/newsroom/2018-annual-and-4th-quarter-us-...

I have no idea what you're talking about. Why would the airline harm their own profit just to harm Google? There's no incentive to reduce how much they'll make. More so if they know that Google is guaranteeing the price, they can raise the price higher (or not lower it when they would, rather) to keep more of the profit for themselves.

The Google legal and business team must already have deals in place.

1,000,000 tickets

$100 loss per ticket

Total loss for Google: $100,000,000 Google's cash balance is $120,000,000,000 Google's operating income in 2018: $30,000,000,000

Co-ordination and system changes required to pull this trickery for airlines probably: $100,000,000 (and not even sure if it's legal)

Can't believe how naive hacker news is when it comes to business and change-management and legal and pretty much everything else

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