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Comment by Kirby64 | Hacker News Reader

Airline tickets and train tickets are because they want to identify the person, for tracking/supposed national security purposes. Also, you typically can transfer train tickets. Depends on the country.

Dinner reservations: I’ve literally never had an issue “transferring” a reservation. There’s no verification, often, and the reservation tools typically let you change contact details. If I present myself as John Smith, I’ve never once had anyone question that.

Concert tickets are almost certainly in the 'dinner reservation' category. They have no need to identify me for national security reasons, so transferring them should not be a problem.

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Airline tickets are done for identity at some level (although even that is dubious since until recently you could fly without any id at all), but at another level they charge exorbitant fees to change the name on the ticket or even to just cancel the itinerary.

Seems to be partly price discrimination, I guess that people willing to pay more will fork out for flexible tickets. Same goes for seat allocation.

there are 300 people on the plane (big one) and 80k people watching taylor swift. national security is funny way to put this…

To be fair, we didn't start having the government screen people on planes when hijackers were merely endangering one plane worth of people. About 3,000 people died and likely tens of thousands of people were injured before we started doing that.

Because 3,000 people died I am unable to just transfer my upcoming flight to someone else? Even if this crazy sentence rang through in any way, just this year I had to fly twice "the next day" so-to-speak and basically bought tickets and then flew the next day. 9/11 is as far from a reason why airline tickets are non-transferable as it gets.

I didn’t make the claim you’re arguing against, that was someone else.

But the answer to your question is: partially

The reason you can’t change it overall is simply airline policy for business reasons. But the reason you can’t change even a misspelling within the last couple of days before a flight is in fact security related.

> Concert tickets are almost certainly in the 'dinner reservation' category. They have no need to identify me for national security reasons

Admittedly I haven't been to many concerts, but 'national security reasons' seems like a reasonable rationale to me because a packed concert sounds like a great place to set off a suicide bomb vest for maximum impact. Have a cut-out who doesn't raise any red flags buy the ticket and hand it off to the person wearing the vest. No ID check? Mass panic ensues when the vest goes off, and people are hurt in the stampede for the exits even if the blast radius of the vest itself isn't all that large.

Lots of big venues have metal detectors or wands, which targets the right thing, instead of privacy.

Metal detectors or whatever other measures are a more direct solution

By your argument, you should have to produce ID before going into any crowded public space.

Pure security theater, and your argument is further invalidated by the fact that it's a made-up reason. No one has claimed this is mandated by TSA or other security authorities.

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