Ironic that the NYT cracks down on people evading its paywall but is selling content on doing the same for air travel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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...)
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!"
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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
Speaking as a college student, college students eat ramen today so they can eat ramen tomorrow instead of eating steak today and not eating tomorrow.
And when I say "tomorrow", I really mean the whole week.
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?
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.
Now there is no reason to delay the flight.
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.
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.
Why should customers show the airlines any more courtesy than they are shown by the airlines in such matters?
When you walk away, you are one-sidedly breaking your agreement.
It's quite easy to see that two parties making a voluntary agreement != unethical, while one party breaking that agreement == unethical.
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.
Ironic that the NYT cracks down on people evading its paywall but is selling content on doing the same for air travel.
The NYT has done no such thing. They have gone after people for trademark violation. Big diffence :)
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!
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.
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.
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.
So you're the reason the lawyers don't let us do fun stuff in the US anymore!
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.
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).
* Yes, I'm aware this is a cognitive bias. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
A person who wants to blow up an airliner. That's the point.