Hacker News Reader

Comment by esafak | Hacker News Reader

I prefer airlines that don't nickel and dime. In fact, I prefer to fly less since the experience has consistently deteriorated over decades. If you travel internationally you get the added fun of dealing with border agents. And even they have discovered price discrimination, with their VIP lines.

All told, is all this chicanery benefiting airlines?

View on HN

It's made it so that relatively poor people can afford to regularly fly all over the world, which is a relatively new thing.

Lowe middle income people in lower middle income countries can afford to fly somewhat regularly, and even internationally, too.

Flying used to be just for the rich only as far back as the 60s, and for nobody as far back as 200 years...

The vast majority of the world’s population can’t afford to fly. The relatively poor part of your comment is weird. Flying is still for the rich.

Flying used to be for the ultra rich, people’d gather around them to listen to their plane ride story. The poor in this case are not the poorest but poor comparatively

Okay, sure, if lower middle income people in China are rich.

Even middle income people in India can afford flights...

> It's made it so that relatively poor people can afford to regularly fly all over the world, which is a relatively new thing.

has _it_? do what is _it_ again?

>> All told, is all this chicanery benefiting airlines?

i'm really curious how screwing passengers has done these things.

Airlines are actually very low margin business. Thus, all these pricing tactics merely offset the drastically cheaper tickets. It makes sense, their margins are so low that they have to nickel and dime everything to make a small profit in good years and avoid going under next recession.

If you fit more people onto a flight, you can make more money, while the journey is less comfortable for the passengers.

and if all those people paid the same amount then there would be the same end result, but the situation would have nothing to do with the conversation, so i'm afraid that explains nothing.

Business and 1st class subsidizes basically all of Economy class.

Yes, it’s a way to extract something from all buckets. Higher income people you can get more money but with low incoming ones you get a lot more quantity since there are way more lower income people. Laws and regulations prevent people standing up or overloading planes with passengers so this is the alternative.

I'd rather go back to only being able to fly once every few years as opposed to the bacchanal that is Ryanair...

you can do that by choosing a different airline

Ryanair has been very successful with their PR. They've made sure that people who don't fit their customer profile will have an irrational hate for the airline without ever having flew them. And that people who are looking for the biggest bargains flock to them. And the price difference is just ridiculous.

And I don't even understand what everyone's problem with Ryanair is, except maybe the company's treatment of its own personnel. Flights have been just as smooth as with some more expensive carriers. I haven't gone to any party destinations though, if that's what the bacchanal reference is about.

I also have greatly enjoyed their flights for the most part. The reference was in relation to the drunken fights that seem to be a "common" occurance.

Spirit Air in the US has somewhat of a similar rep.

Then save your pennies and fly in first class. The choice is all yours.

> All told, is all this chicanery benefiting airlines?

Yes.

An example is paid baggage. It used to be that stowage space was mostly a waste of capacity on an airplane. But with the help of modern software making coordinating shipping easier, they can make lucrative money shipping cargo on passenger flights.

So encouraging passengers to not bring bags and keeping that capacity for cargo is a feature, not a bug.

I always ship my baggage via insured carrier (Fedex, DHL, etc) and take a small carry on for immediate needs. It's MUCH cheaper and safer.

Or I just don't bring anything that won't fit in my lap.

FedEx'ing baggage between home and a distant hotel is awesome. I haven't done it recently, so maybe with airline fees it is always cheaper. It used to be that you had to have a corporate account with enough discounts to make it cheaper than checked luggage.

Big hotels host lots of conferences, legal depositions, business shows, etc. They get a FedEx truck almost daily and don't blink if a package arrives addressed to you with "Guest checking in on XXXX date" appended to it. It happens all the time! And when you leave, you call the front desk and ask them to take a box to the loading dock for the next FedEx truck.

Alternatively, my brother has done a lot of business travel in his life, and I love the advice he gave me:

"Never pack more than you are willing to carry a mile down a gravel road in the rain"

I have yet to regret a trip where I pack extremely light.

When I travel, I often stay in rentals that have laundry machines, because it’s so much easier just to pack light and do laundry every couple of days. I’m also not against packing light with the intention of going shopping if I need something. That’s how I get a lot of fun clothes!

The tradeoff on short domestic flights is that it encourages more - and larger - carry-ons, which slows down boarding/deplaning and therefore adds to turnaround time. If I don't have to pay for checked bags, I'd often prefer to have mine checked, especially if I have a connection - but since I do, I'll squeeze everything into a carry-on roller bag instead. Personally, it only takes me an extra second or two, but when you have a whole family doing this and only parent who can actually reach the overhead bins, it bogs down the whole aisle.

This is why I love it when airlines charge for carry-on bags, like spirit does. Everyone just has a teeny little backpack. Getting on and off is a breeze.

I think it's kinda race to the bottom / lemons market. A lot of people search for flights through aggregators so you need to optimize for the price shown there, and the customer doesn't know if that's the real price or if there'll be add ons so they won't go for a more expensive one on faith.

Best bet is finding out which airline treats you best and going all the way to a loyalty card with them or something I guess? that seems to work out a little better

I've heard it said that airlines make all their money from interest payments on points. That is the credit card companies are buying miles today, and when the flight is taken the airline faces the charge in between that time they invest the money and collect the interest.

I'm not sure if it is true, but it is an interesting insight even if not strictly true.

It's not just time-value. It's also not just tying/advertising (although it is some of that - if I'm getting a ton of "free" points to American, I'm more likely to fly with them). It's both of those, and so much more.

Loyalty points work like gift cards in that huge numbers of them go unredeemed for any value, so selling them is just printing money. And unlike gift cards, which are typically denominated in currency, airline points don't have a fixed exchange rate to USD, so the airline can sell them to Chase or whatever for $0.01, and then if it needs to rebalance the books to shed the outstanding liability it can easily adjust the point costs of flights to make them only worth $0.009 - it's the same as a price hike, but in a way that's less noticeable to most customers most of the time. And that's assuming they don't just sell the points at an outright profit to begin with.

You can find a number of analyses showing that airlines operate at a loss if you set aside the miles-economy revenue streams. United famously got a line of credit secured against their loyalty program in 2020, in which they and their creditors valued the loyalty program at more than the value of the entire company of United Airlines - which would naively imply that the actual airline, the part of the company that owns large expensive machines and actually sells a product to consumers, had negative value.

Here's a longer overview with numbers and sources - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggUduBmvQ_4

Kind of like how GM's credit arm was briefly more profitable than the actual manufacturing.

If GM also owned an oil company and shares in Apple, those parts of it would also probably be more profitable than making cars.

It's technically true but only because airline overall profits are really low. So you can pick any profitable corner of the business and say "the airline makes all their profit from branded toy lines" or what have you.

>> All told, is all this chicanery benefiting airlines?

No. There is no competitive advantage. If they don't implement price discrimination, they go bankrupt. If they do implement price discrimination, they still go bankrupt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airline_bankruptcies_i....

> I prefer to fly less since the experience has consistently deteriorated over decades.

I never liked flying, but was able to put up with it better when I was younger.

Nowadays, I get some satisfaction by leveraging credit card points through my business to get "free" tickets. I mentally steel myself to the unpleasantness of the airport, boarding, and flying, and try to get as much work done on my laptop as possible when I am sitting down so at least I can feel that I accomplished something by the time I reach my destination.

> All told, is all this chicanery benefiting airlines?

I am pretty comfortable it contributes to revenue and profit outcomes the board likes.

It feels like competitive pressures in some markets drive away all the profits leaving corporations with no choice but to engage in underhand tactics.

Car rentals and printer inks are a couple of examples of the same process leading to really shitty behaviour on the suppliers part.

I agree. Boards should be under more pressure to deliver longterm outcomes of benefit beyond their immediate board term, KPIs and rewards. Possibly the path out is to make some board renumeration tied to 5 and ten year success.

These shitty LCC patterns make short term revenue and the long term consequence of market share moves don't get factored in.

> If you travel internationally you get the added fun of dealing with border agents

That's avoidable. If you are a citizen of an advanced economy flying to another you can just use the automatic passport gates.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com