LCN, Canada’s largest French-language news channel, has interviewed me as a travel expert a few times recently, so I figured I’d share the content of the clip here for once. The topic this week: many U.S. airlines were caught charging solo travelers a much higher price for some plane tickets.
The routes affected were all domestic, and it’s true that there weren’t many routes. But still…
I’ll be posting more content on how flight prices work, because it’s important to understand this if you want to become an expert at finding cheap flights like us.
Here’s the short version of the interview I gave.
Solo travelers were paying more
Airfare pricing is extremely complex: almost all travelers are willing to pay a different price, and airlines are great at segmentation to keep planes filled.
Usually, searching for 2 passengers can be more expensive than searching for 1 passenger. Because if there’s just 1 ticket left in the lower fare bucket, the airline will show the higher price for both tickets.
But in the U.S., some airlines were doing the opposite on a few domestic routes.
For example, searching for 1 passenger would cost $200, but searching for 2 passengers would cost $120 each.
The reasoning behind it kind of makes sense: solo travelers are more often business travelers, and business travelers are willing to pay a lot more for the same flight.
Still, it penalizes leisure travelers who travel solo, which is really unfortunate. As a (very) frequent traveler, I would hate for this to spread.
As soon as this started going viral, airlines seemed to have stopped this practice. But then many of them restarted, so we’ll see if it spreads.
We’ll keep an eye on this for you!
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Featured image: LCN interview (image credit: LCN, edited by Flytrippers)
