Scarcity, Inventory, and Inequity: A Deep Dive into Airline Fare Buckets | Hacker News Reader

Scarcity, Inventory, and Inequity: A Deep Dive into Airline Fare Buckets

blog.getjetback.com

130 pointsbdev1234553 comments

recently, i bought a full economy fare on an international flight. When i went to check in, they offered a really cheap upgrade to first. it was a no brainer and i was excited since the flight was gonna be ~6 hours.

i had a rude awakening when i got to the airport. This "first class" ticket was actually more like a premium economy ticket. I didn't get access to the first class check in line, no access to the lounge, no priority boarding, and the seats themselves had no extra bonus other than being in the front of the plane and slightly wider.

it was at that moment i realized there was no beating airlines and good deals aren't really that good unless you got the money to spend.

What airline?

Has to be Iceland Air.

I remember Iceland Air being a reasonably nice flag carrier when I was a kid. The pivot into low cost after the financial crisis and competition from WOW air had a lot of negative ramifications.

My guess also as they are one of the few that has intl first/biz class that isn't lay flat.

You can beat airlines. Mistake fares and fares sold below cost definitely exist, though they're a lot less common than they used to be as pricing models have improved. You're more likely to see them if you pay attention to off-season and new routes that aren't popular. Severe weather predictions and similar events can also create large price drops. I once got a $20 flight to Hawaii by simply buying just before a typhoon that didn't hit.

> Mistake fares

A friend of mine recently got a too-good-to-be-true fare from Europe to Asia on Qatar, and the ticket was promptly cancelled and refunded by the airline when they found the error.

I have flown "first class" on flights that turned out to be small airplanes and there was not much to the first class distinction, seats only slightly bigger, no special food, etc.

I'm confused a little by what you are saying, are you saying that there was first class boarding but you were not allowed to participate? was there a first class lounge with the name of your airline and you were not allowed to use it? etc.

It's a bit more tricky than that. Increasingly business and first class tickets have biz or first "lite" tickets that unbundle the seat from other benefits like lounge access and even seat selection or baggage fees. Also in the US, a lot of domestic airlines don't give you lounge access unless you're flying internationally. E.g. a first class ticket for United, American, and Delta a domestic first class ticket won't get you into the corresponding airline lounge. You'll need a club membership or to be flying on a first+ class (e.g. Polaris, Flagship, or D360) ticket to get into the lounge.

Airline lounges are overcrowded and often not much nicer than the terminal. I, then Qantas Platinum, spent some time in American 'first'¹ lounges back in 2015-2020. What a shambles! So I understand why they'd want to limit the attendance.

I also had the misfortune to spend 6 hours in a BA lounge in Heathrow in 2022. Good lord. At least the gin was free.

Travelling ain't what it was.

¹Here in Australia there's no such thing as domestic First. We call that Business: if you want to travel First, you must go internationally.

That's why the airlines started having separate lounges primarily for the Polaris, Delta One, and Flagship fliers. They are what the prior lounges used to be. Delta One at LHR is also nice because you check in at the counter and head to a special elevator and private security screening which dumps you out right at the lounge.

At least during irregular operations, the staff at the lounge often have the ability to reschedule you onto flights or routings that regular staff can't (due to inexperience or due to privileges). If bad weather results in multiple cancellations, being able to walk up to the agents in the lounge and have them help get you onto a rescheduled flight is often very much worth it.

I never understood the need to pay extra for getting on the plane first. I travel light and I couldn't care less about the overhead bins. Which would be the only valid reason to board early. And I'll gladly be on the plane last so I can minimize the amount of time I have to share farts with my fellow passengers. Airplanes are not very pleasant places to be. And the cattle herding that is boarding these days is very unpleasant.

I flew a few weeks ago (Lufthanse, Lisbon to Berlin). I found some seating near the gate (always in short supply) and I observed people starting to queue to board. Lufthansa uses groups to structure the boarding. Mine was group five, last in (perfect!). So I remained seated while people nervously started to queue long before the gate was open. In the end, it took another 40 minutes before I stood up and boarded. Some of the people queuing were in the same group as me so they just got told off by the ground staff and were kind of just waiting for their turn right until the end.

The most stupid thing is when the boarding turns out to be a bus ride to the plane. You get crammed into the bus with all the other passengers and then the last one in is the first one out into the plane. I've seen that happen on smaller flights. So, you get people paying extra to be first into the bus being out competed by people like me that just wait until the last moment. The bus won't leave until the bus is crammed full. And it generally has no or very little seating. Much better to be on the last bus.

Overhead bin space is a big one. Even as am someone who travels with a duffle at almost always fits. I’ve had to check it before being in the last group, waiting til the end.

One other one I ran into with the “dead last” strategy was I ended up waiting in line anyhow… on the jet bridge, which was worse than waiting in a queue in a nice airport terminal. So my purely practical brain says to go at the beginning of my group, get it over with, and then I can be settled with no worries rather than having to pay attention to the boarding sequence at all.

I was like you--tried to be the last guy on the plane--until I started to fly very frequently (every other week). I started getting upgraded to first, which means really boarding before everyone and not having to wait in line/in the tunnel to get to my (now comfortable) seat.

Boarding at the very beginning makes a huge difference.

It's a 30 minute chunk of time in which you get to relax. Once you're in your seat there really is nothing else to do. You can work, you can watch a movie, you can think, read a book.

No latent anxiety wondering when I should get up, no "I can't really focus on this book because I might have to get up any minute," etc.

For a relatively short flight (2 hours) it's a pretty meaningful % of time that becomes a lot more relaxing.

Yup. I was flying SFO -> SEA last year to visit family after a work trip, and Alaska Air had a screaming deal on first class, so I bought it. So nice to just walk on, sit (in a decently comfortable seat!) down, and do whatever you want while waiting for boarding to finish. Get a drink, do some work, read, whatever.

> until I started to fly very frequently

This is a key point. When I used to fly once or twice per year to go on vacation it didn't really matter too much. Now I'm flying sometimes more than twice/month often international and all these little niceties add up. Global Entry is a must, some type of lounge with wifi and snacks is nice. Getting on early enough so I don't have to worry about them forcing me to check which then adds a ton of time when I land (or worse, lost luggage which happens all the time). And yes, I can relax and get back to what I was doing - likely reading a book :)

i get it. i used to be like that too... and then we had kids and that changed everything lmao. Now I rather have peace of mind that i have an overhead bin with all our stuff right next to us

This article got me into the fascinating rabbit hole of airline websites for travel agencies.

It turns out most airlines have one, and while some content seems to be gated behind contracts and login walls, a lot of it is just out there.

Compared to the consumer-focused sites, there's a lot less marketing fluff and a lot more industry lingo (which Google and/or a frontier model can usually help you with). Most of the content is just weird aviation trivia; those sites won't let you book a flight, but you will learn a lot of minutiae about how an Amdeus PNR looks like, how to indicate that a passenger is carrying human ashes in Sabre, or what order an agent needs to make bookings in.

Some interesting things I found, in no particular order:

https://www.lufthansaexperts.com/shared/files/lufthansa/publ...

https://www.qatarairways.com/tradeportal/en/bookingnticketin...

https://support.travelport.com/webhelp/Smartpoint1P/Content/...

https://pro.delta.com/content/agency/us/en/site-map.html

https://pro.delta.com/content/agency/us/en/policy-library/di...

https://air.flyingway.com/books/amadeus/Amadeus_Guide.pdf

Was not expecting to read the whole thing. Very interesting.

Was it really interesting? To me, it has certain hallmarks of an AI-generated article. In particular, it introduces the same concept several times, in different sections. For example, fare classes, nested booking, and the SABRE system each get two different introductions.

The content seems legitimate, but I felt like my time was being wasted through at minimum a lack of editing.

Yeah, there was a lot of repetitive information which made me lose interest

Should have passed it through AI for a summary!

> To me, it has certain hallmarks of an AI-generated article.

I wondered that too.

I don't want to offend anyone, and have no idea how it was written, and I already know most of this stuff so am not the audience. But respectfully I feel like it had a lot of words for a fairly shallow overview, which feels AI-ish, plus the "delve" at the beginning got my radar up. This is sort of what I expect from Manus or one of those ersatz "research" LLMs. Anyway, it's got lots of upvotes, hopefully people are finding it useful.

(Edit to add: it's actually content marketing for some kind of [questionable, subscribe to access some hidden refund thing] travel company so I don't feel bad criticizing anymore)

What's funny about it is that even though it follows the instructions your writing instructor gave you to always write a conclusion for your articles (and that probably are the instructions in the prompt for an LLM) it does not follow the instructions that I got from everybody I ever did content marketing with: to always end an article with a "call to action", which is why this article was up for hours before anybody noticed the site it was on.

Article can be skipped here.

"Deep-dive" is the call-to-action.

"Airlines don't just sell seats - they manage a dynamic inventory of fares, divided into booking classes (fare buckets)"

that "They don't just _____ -- they ________" construction! It's definitely a "once you see it" thing that you start to see constantly in AI-generated content! I wonder why the model loves that so much

Training on content with parallelism

"delves"

dashes

an explicit "conclusion" section at the end

Humans do not write conclusions? As someone who went to college, that is a natural way to end a long essay. True mark of higher education would be writing the conclusion at the top.

It's called an executive summary in that case, ain't it?

I was thinking an academic Abstract, but sure.

Exactly, it's a natural way to write a college essay. I've never not cringed reading an article/blog post that is structured that way, it comes across very contrived. I've also noticed that LLMs tend to prefer it, and humans tend to avoid it in general.

For a 500 word blog post, sure it may be a bit much. This article was a decently hefty read, for which the summary callouts are not out of place.

None of which are hard AI tells.

> dashes

I am forever angry that LLMs have ruined em-dashes. They’re a wonderful part of punctuation.

I think this is an example of above average but not great AI writing. I still read it to the end because the subject is interesting and there is enough focus (and, seemingly) expertise on the topic.

I think the telltale for me that makes me count as heavily AI-assisted is the lack of inclusion of real, inline examples of actual fares & their restrictions. I know I've seen them broken down before in other content. But not once here was there a full readout of an actual fare bucket & its rules. I think a human writer would have been tempted to include even one of those as an artifact, but an AI as a topic reviewer/summarizer/collator won't unless explicitly instructed.

Great overview.

It would seem that the old rule of thumb of booking long in advance to get a cheaper ticket isn’t really relevant anymore?

I didn’t have that take. My understanding is the only time you’re guaranteed to have low-cost ticket availability is when the flight is initially allowing booking.

Later, as more tickets are sold they have more information about the flight and thus they may make adjustments to the ticket pricing. Either opening up more low-cost tickets that were sold at the beginning of the flight or reducing the number of low-cost tickets to meet high demand.

It's worth pointing out that the initial fares will be comparatively cheap fare classes, but they may not be the cheapest prices depending on what happens with demand closer to the flight date. You can often get better fares by waiting if you're flexible.

I worked for an airline fare pricing startup. The key to getting a lower fare is to not be flying for business.

Since airlines can't outright ask you if you're flying business, they'll instead offer tradeoffs that a business flier won't make. So plan in advance, but be flexible in trading off day-of-week or time-of-day.

What are some tells of a business flight? The only one that comes to my mind: I am doing whatever is possible to fly out on Monday or Friday rather than give up my weekend for the company.

I have always booked corporate flights through an internal portal system. I assumed that this identified me as a belonging to X company, so my options would be priced by some standing agreement with the airline. Is this not true?

I'm not the best person to answer, but it's really any price<->X tradeoff, whether that's being able to choose at the last minute, going to your preferred airport in the destination city, or even those other bullshit upcharges airlines have.

Crappy routing. Business travelers aren't going to fly from Salt Lake to London via LAX and EWR for example. Airlines will offer wacky routes at lower prices that obviously cost them more in terms of fuel and airframe time, because they know people who value their time (and aren't paying themselves) will not accept them. This is particularly prevalent with award travel. You can try to game their system though -- find a crazy route that you actually want to fly (12h stopover in some city you want to visit), but which the airline's algorithm sees as unappealing.

I think a huge tell tends to be flying in on monday and flying out friday. A lot of cheaper tickets require you to spend saturday night at the destination to weed out business travel. Other people mentioned multi-stop routing and odd timing (e.g. biz travel usually won't involve leaving at 3pm on a tuestday). Some of this is obscured by day time flights being more desirable (e.g. no one wants to get up at 3am to make a 6am flight).

The other huge tell is last minute purchases. A lot of business travel ends up being decided on a week or two before the flight so last minute flights tend to cost more even though in some sense the value of the seat declines as the flight approaches. E.g. an empty seat is worth $0 and a pure loss to the airline so they should want to sell those seats before the flight even if they get minimal revenue. For biz travelers, clients often pay for travel expenses so inflated pricing for that flight tomorrow is worth it.

I anecdotally find flight prices tend to follow a cosine wave. Starting high, dipping a couple months before, and shooting back up. You can see these sorts of trends on Google Flights which will show historical pricing for your search query.

And it can be helpful if you’re very flexible. If my dates are very strict then I’ll tend to book further in advance, whereas if I have a lot of wiggle room then I’ll wait it out.

> it can be helpful if you’re very flexible

My biggest takeaway from this article is that I should go and see which of these systems have APIs I can query, because if I have a lot of flexibility I think it'd be easier to script it than clicking through a whole bunch of different options on google flights trying to find what the cheapest fare is. I want to be able to write a script that says "here are my dealbreakers, here are the range of dates I can leave on, here's the range for coming back, go and find the best deal"

I guess that's the type of service people typically build and charge for.

The real answer is that it depends. With fare management, a small allocation of cheap tickets might be made available when the flight is listed (e.g. 350 days in advance) however more cheap tickets may be added or removed over time depending on how sales go when compared to airline projections.

Wonder how this will look after Delta Airlines AI based price discrimination based on how much AI thinks a customer is willing to pay.

Very interesting article... however I’ve looked into the service (JetBack) and it seems extremely suspicious. It’s the first time I’m hearing about airlines refunding fare drops, so I’ve asked a friend who’s an airline points geek and he says it’s bullshit. Eh?

Yeah I'm skeptical.

> It's standard practice for airlines to offer refunds or credits when prices drop after you book

Why would they do that? Unless there's some regulation forcing them to I can't imagine a company would willingly give up money like that, no matter how many hoops they make you jump through.

I’ve looked into it a bit more and looks like they’re US only – might have something to do with the fact that US tickets are mostly refundable by law.

So yeah, it could work in this particular case, but still not sure it’s a good deal. They say they’re getting you some “credits”, while you could just rebook for the new price and refund the old one and get the difference in cash instead.

I've gotten to the point where if it's less than a 10ish hour drive, I will drive. Air travel has just turned to complete shit.

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