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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Yup exactly. Some events are pretty bad at opening the doors early. The Brooklyn Nets seem to open 30 minutes before the game, so they need to get 20,000 people through 20 metal detectors in 30 minutes. Every second extra they add to the process is a second you don't have to buy a $25 drink, and that's how they make their money.

We check IDs for flights because airline yield management demands that there be no resale, or business travelers would be traveling on leisure fares.

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> or business travelers would be traveling on leisure fares.

Don't they already do that anyway? Every time I've gotten on a plane for work purposes, there was no differentiation between "business traveler" v. "leisure traveler" as far as the ticket purchasing process was concerned. Hell, in the most recent case it was even with my own credit card (for which I submitted an expense report to be reimbursed) - so for all the airline knew, I was just taking a week-long vacation to Colorado Springs (in that case) instead of being there for work.

The rates are typically different if you stay a Saturday night. Business travelers go home on Friday night. (SFO-NYC on Friday night was always a tough flight to book. I usually stayed the extra night so I could fly 1st or Business for less money.)

If you could buy someone else's ticket on the secondary market, then you could do a split ticket thing where you both stay Saturday night but neither of you actually do.

Everyone should change their name to Pat Smith and end this scam once and for all.

> The rates are typically different if you stay a Saturday night.

I recently flew from the US to Europe and returning on Thursday or Friday was twice the price of flying home on Saturday or Sunday - the weekend return options actually showed up as free during booking.

>We check IDs for flights because airline yield management demands that there be no resale, or business travelers would be traveling on leisure fares.

Sorry, what? Surely business travelers pay more just by virtue of traveling by business class? Or, if travel through business portals was consistently significantly more expensive than just buying the ticket directly on the airline's website, businesses would just start buying tickets directly from the airline's website?

Is there something about how ticket fares are calculated and paid that I don't understand?

Business travelers != travelers in business class.

Airlines use a fair number of techniques to price discriminate between leisure and business passengers.

Last minute / next day fares have traditionally been far more expensive than 3 week advance, and that was intended to impact business travel more than leisure. If there was a 3rd party marketplace for airline tickets, last minute tickets would not be nearly as expensive and the airlines would make far less money.

Consider an example where we have a business traveler "Bob" and a leisure traveler "Larry". Bob needs to get to LAX tomorrow to put out a fire at a client site. Larry has a trip booked to LAX tomorrow, but can't go because he's sick. Larry has paid $500 for the trip 3 weeks ago.

Today: Larry cancels his trip, and maybe, if he's lucky, gets an airline credit for the original price of the trip that expires in a year and which may be hard to use for his next trip. When he cancels, a seat opens up on the plane, and the airline sells it to Bob for $1200.

If resale was permitted: Larry auctions off his ticket at an airline ticket reseller. He gets $700 from Bob. So if resale was permitted, Bob's business saves $500, and Larry makes $200, and the airline looses $1200-$1700. You can see why they hate resale.

Okay, but how many business flights are actually last-minute like that? Whenever I've flown for work reasons the tickets were bought at least a week in advance, and usually 3+ weeks in advance.

Likewise, there are plenty of non-business flights booked last-minute like that, too - like, as a personal example, needing to book a same-night flight to help a family member drive cross-country with her kids and personal belongings so she could get out of a dangerous personal situation.

All this being to say: if price differentiation between in-advance v. last-minute bookings is actually intended to make business travel cost more than leisure travel, I'm thoroughly skeptical of that intent being fulfilled in practice. Seems more likely that it's simply a matter of things costing more when they're more scarce (as seats on an airplane would become as it gets closer and closer to the departure time), and that just so happens to impact business travelers more than leisure travelers.

I would guess most of your exposure to business travel is within tech or consulting, which rarely require last-minute booking. I would imagine most last-minute bookings for business travel come from people in sales. I’ve seen many sales people find out a prospective client is open to meet and immediately hop on a flight just to potentially make a sale. The opportunity cost is worth it even for small businesses. My exposure to this was for wholesale and retail distribution of consumer electronics but I’d imagine that this would apply to any business with a sales team.

About half of the work trips I've been on, the tickets were booked at most a couple days in advance. The most expensive ticket I've ever bought was an economy United cross country flight to LAX for $1500 (booked about 14 hours in advance) and I've done a lot of vacations to Europe. We booked it last minute because we didn't know when the project would be ready to deliver and once it was, we had to deliver ASAP. I was on the ground in LA for about 12 hours before flying home. Awful trip. Largest ratio of dollars spent to enjoyment received I've ever experienced.

Or physical world engineering: my brother had to hop on a plane last minute to go fix in place a machine having issues plenty of times.

I almost always book tickets for business travel 1-3 day before the trip. I am completely price insensitive (I do not care if my employer pays $100 or $400 for the ticket), my schedule is hard to predict ahead of time (if there are no important meetings on Monday, I will fly on Monday. If something important pops up I may fly on Sunday or on Tuesday). Downside is smaller seat selection (I mitigate by always checking if aisle seat available before booking) and sometimes convenient flights sell out.

My employer does some kind of credit system so we get cash credits for future trips which we can use for nicer hotels next time. Something like that. I don't fly often/ever. I should clarify the credit is the difference of the expected price vs what we paid. So if flight is normally 300 and we pay 200 we get 100 towards future travel. And then there are upper limits to what we can expense and the credits offset that.

That sounds pretty easy to game. But I think in these cases, they take what they can get and can’t really game it.

I think Google does it now. One problem is see is that people may optimize for price tickets and not business goals to get bigger credit. Business need is 2 day trip but people may extend it by 2 days to get cheaper air tickets but on balance it will be more for the company due to additional hotel cost.

Yeah, I don't think that's right either. They don't check your ID at the gate, it's just TSA that checks your id (if you have one).

Depends on the departure and arrival city. It is common for ID to be checked at the gate for international flights because airlines are held responsible for transporting passengers that don't have the correct paperwork / visitor permits for the destination country.

Yes, and the airlines don't (generally) let you change the name on a ticket.

And they require a boarding pass. Which can’t be changed without the airline’s permission.

Back in the old days, sales like this were common. No ID checks, non-passengers allowed through security, and the classified ads in newspapers would say “round-trip coach ticket May 8-12 JFK to SFO, male name, call 212-555-1234”. So you met them, got your paper ticket, got a boarding pass at the counter or the gate, and flew.

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