Airline Ticket Pricing

[FormerHangie]

My wife and I are going to Europe this fall, so I've been investigating flights for the last couple of weeks. Since all the transatlantic flights from the east coast are overnight, I wanted to see if I could find something a little better than a coach seat, so we could possibly get some sleep. What I settled on was Delta's Premium Select, which gives us some extra recline and an extending footrest. The lie flat seats were $4800 each, which is the budget for the entire trip, but these were floating around $1700 - $2000, while Main Cabin seats are $1200. Last Friday, the price was $1680, so I went ahead and bought them.

I probably shouldn't do this, but I did check back on Sunday, and the price had gone to $2900! I thought it was a mistake because the only class of seat that had changed was Premium Select. I just checked today and they're up to $3200, and again, only the Premium Select seats had changed.

Obviously, I'm very glad I got them when I did, but that's an insane increase over a couple of days. It makes me wonder if Delta has outsourced their pricing algorithms to Satan.

 

[bflynn]

How many months of an airplane payment would that have covered?

 

[EdFred]

How many months of an airplane payment would that have covered?

For a transatlantic airplane? Less than 1.

 

[midwestpa24]

No one understands the algorithms that govern airfare pricing. There was a CNBC documentary years ago about airline business models and covered American Airlines operations through much of the program. Even the CEO couldn't make sense of it. He mentioned that AA had tried once to go to a more straight forward pricing model like what SW uses, and lost a ton of money doing it. More often than not, no two travelers on an airliner paid the same price for their seat on that airplane.

 

[jordane93]

Don’t know if this is true but I read that the more often you check prices, the higher the prices will be. If you check back on a different browser or private browsing or clearing you cookies, allegedly will stop the prices from increases each time you look at it. Prices are up everywhere. Except summer-fall air travel to be insane.

 

[FormerHangie]

How many months of an airplane payment would that have covered?

It would cover about 20 hours rental of a C-172. At 125 statute miles per hour, that would get us the equivalent of half of one way.

Don’t know if this is true but I read that the more often you check prices, the higher the prices will be. If you check back on a different browser or private browsing or clearing you cookies, allegedly will stop the prices from increases each time you look at it. Prices are up everywhere. Except summer-fall air travel to be insane.

It didn't for me, either on the Delta app or on a web browser.

 

[mandm]

I’m looking at flights now to London and they were about $620 in economy, not keen to sit in economy, lie flat seats were running closer to the 8-10k mark. I did see some “fake” business class seats for $3200 that were marked as standard recliners with undesirable connections.

 

[mandm]

Don’t know if this is true but I read that the more often you check prices, the higher the prices will be. If you check back on a different browser or private browsing or clearing you cookies, allegedly will stop the prices from increases each time you look at it. Prices are up everywhere. Except summer-fall air travel to be insane.

Cookies is old school, you can have an internal counter on your server that when count exceeds 10 searches increase price by X, with a reset in play to reset the flight back to neutral when count is less than 10 within time period.

Combine that with reading your general location, text messages, social media posts and I do believe the microphones record what you’re saying in a room while not on a call to target particular prices and ads to you.

 

[Rich Holt]

I do believe the microphones record what you’re saying in a room while not on a call to target particular prices and ads to you.

I work in a maintenance facility. I had to stop carrying my phone around with me because whenever the foreman and I had a convo about X part, Google and my SM feeds would show ads for that part for the next few days.