Airline standards are the direct consequences of vote with your wallet. No matter what some claim, 99.999% of people will buy the cheapest ticket possible.
This is definitely not the case, otherwise airlines like Delta, United, and American wouldn't be in business.
Business travel is the money making industry for airlines, with leisure travel being lagniappe revenue. Business travelers book tickets based on convenience of schedule over everything else. Loyalty programs direct that purchase to a specific airline. That is a proven fact and factually dismisses your claim that "99.999% purchase" based on cost.
I simply don’t believe one can simplify down the profits as crudely as you have put it.
People will go on vacation once or maybe twice a year, but fly on business a dozen or more times.
Often you will hear "we really make money on B and A is just a hobby" a few years later or maybe a few hours later to a different audience.
If a company is serving you as a hobby then it is not listening to you through price signals, you are going to get bad service, and the company will be out of touch for the market and heading for bankruptcy in the long term unless it is counting on a bail-out.
Because as a former IBM SE, I've done it HUNDREDS of times for business travel. Literally hundreds of times. Last second tickets, fully refundable tickets, you name it.
The ticket pricing market is designed to extract maximum revenue from business travelers (convenience) and keep them coming back (loyalty programs).
Don't be obtuse and argumentative. This is the way it is and it is a fact. Stop trying to find answers that don't exist.
https://www.routledge.com/Why-Cant-We-Make-Money-in-Aviation...
In the last decade airlines merged a lot and have gotten some monopoly profits in the US but that looks like it is all over.
More fundamentally airlines look like a broken business that makes excuses after the fact and is allowed to get away with by enablers.
I find it hard to believe, however, because the usual pattern when I want to fly out of my small airport is as follows.
I might find United is $298.44 and so is Delta. American airlines is $301.55. Maybe there is a $375 flight listed with an extra stop on one of the airlines. The next price up is a $700 flight which has nothing obviously special about it, in fact it might be worse with more stops, more delays, and worse timing. (Maybe the expensive flight lets me reschedule or has some other benefit but that's not clear when I am buying the ticket)
The market is not giving me any meaningful choice at all through the price mechanism in that two airlines seem to be colluding to give me the exact same price, and the difference between the third is so small that $3.11 is not worth thinking about if you find anything about the American flight preferable to the other two.
In theory I could pay $1200 for a first class flight but the first leg of the flight has no first class cabin, and that's a huge jump. Before 2008 there was no "Premium Economy" or other efforts to let people vote with their dollars in a meaningful way. Still it's limited. When I save everybody time and frustration by checking a bag instead of contributing to "rollerbag hell", why I am paying more when I should be getting a discount?
Looking at airline pricing shows the rules of microeconomics are being thoroughly violated and I'm not going to believe the claim that "customers won't pay more for a better experience" until somebody hits the STOP button on both the flights and the airline bank accounts and accountants go over every single line and they can tell a story that makes sense.
What I see is that customers aren't being offered meaningful choices about their flights, or if they are, only in certain geographies.
I was a 737 hater long before the MAX came along so now it's appealing to drive to Syracuse to take Jetblue which is a no Boeing airline. In terms of $'s to the airline it isn't dramatically different than what I'd pay to fly out of Ithaca, but I an now paying with transport costs and maybe an extra night's hotel stay.
At ITH the service from the major airlines is undifferentiated (do you want to fly a CRJ-200 or E-145?) other than the hub you go to. Delta's Detroit hub is ideal for the west coast, American's hub is ideal for points south. Somehow they charge the exact same for flights that must cost differently for the airlines so there must be price fixing involved.
For me American and United are always the same price, but Delta wants me to fly to their Atlanta hub for some reason, while American and United hubs are approximately the same overall flight distance.
The real kick is "full content agreements" - the airline has to promise not to undercut the final fee charged by GDS/Agency. This ensured nice profits for the GDS ecosystem, but airlines are starting to fight back by pulling out of them (and hence increasing prices for indirect bookings)
I mean its the same situation as every man-in-the-middle platform right? You have players who hate paying the middle guy, and try to spin off, but everyone else gets too much value to break off
Sometimes the middlemen are worth paying. They might be better at searching all your alternatives and so they can find a route that you didn't find at all in your search. They might know something that you didn't think of (yes the non-stop is $100 cheaper, but wouldn't you prefer two 8 hour flights and two hours to walk around an airport over 16 hours in your economy seat?) They might guarantee your cruise doesn't leave without you if your flight is late. Only sometimes though.
It’s the same issue for airlines, you don’t want to have to open 10 tabs every time you want to search for an itinerary, so there will always be middlemen. The airlines just want to make sure the middlemen don’t have as much power :)
Give me the option to pay the real cost of a comfortable seat, and I'll pay it.
No, I don't believe it costs 5x as much.
Every single airline sells the same product, more or less. The same 2-3 class system, at the same price differentials, with the same seat width and pitches.
For the airline industry, yes. This isn't true in all industries.