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This is excellent; surveillance pricing means the death of a competitive free market.

Imagine if your airline knew precisely how badly you needed to be at your destination and knew your $ net worth. Flying to your father’s funeral? That’ll be 20k. Flying for cancer treatment? 30k.

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While I agree with you completely that this is absolutely undesirable, I don't see the relation to competition. Competition between airline carriers still exists no? Delta might charge 20k, and United might charge you 19k or whatever. Seems like competitive market to me. Shitty sure, but shitty and competitive are not mutually exclusive.

It's also a field where it's practically impossible for a new player to enter. It is just as likely that the airlines will form a cartel, and fix the prices. Then if you are lucky, some kind of regulation will be introduced or the government will crack down on it in some ways after 5-10 years, they will be fined for 10% of the profits, and a promise not to do that again.

Entirely correct, and not a consequence of surveillance pricing.

United used to offer a discount for bereavement or medical emergency flights but they stopped doing that in 2015.

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