How the hell are airplane prices decided on?

[Regulus Tera]

I'm currently looking to buy a ticket from Buenos Aires to Houston. Monday night, no biggie. 1700 bucks. Been there, done that.

I decide to try one of the cheap skate websites I heard about. I now do a route from Buenos Aires to Las Vegas with a stopover in Houston. 900 Benjamins.

I'm baffled. I decide to play around with the airports just to see what I get. If I buy a ticket to Boston, even farther away, with the same layover and same flight in Houston, it goes down to 800.

What the fuck

 

[Transistor]

Greed

 

[Lakeside]

They charge what supply and demand will let them charge.

 

[guybrush_threepwood]

Business reasons mostly, they charge as much as they can because they can, especially if its from one "business" city to another.. If you look at domestic flights within the US you'd see the same thing. It is a disgusting practice overall.

 

[Deleted member 8583]

I feel you, looking for a cheap flight to Istanbul from CA for August and the prices are all over the place.

 

[Deleted member 10314]

The tried and true method, throwing darts at a specially made board with random numbers on it.

 

[Dan-o]

Greed > Supply > Demand.

Also... not an ad, but I use Hipmunk to figure out my flights (even though I never actually buy my tickets through them...). Their layout, showing flights based on time/inconvenience, is second-to-none.

 

[WascallyWabbit]

Length of flight is a small part of the ticket cost, you got passenger volume, competition from other airlines, etc.
In your case, they may be the only airline that offers Buenos Aires to Houston, but there's like 5 other airlines that service BA to Boston or Las Vegas
Thus, they can charge more for it.

 

[____]

I've never really understood it either. How do you gauge demand on something like that? I'd be really interested to find out.

 

[Regulus Tera]

Length of flight is a small part of the ticket cost, you got passenger volume, competition from other airlines, etc.
In your case, they may be the only airline that offers Buenos Aires to Houston, but there's like 5 other airlines that service BA to Boston or Las Vegas
Thus, they can charge more for it.

Click to shrink...

All three flights I mentioned are carried by United

 

[Masseyme]

Depends on the airport, carrier, time of the year and day of the week among other things. I've paid like 200 bucks to go from Boston to London on a Sunday and I've paid like 300 bucks from Atlanta to Chicago on a Friday.

 

[Lunaray]

 

[WascallyWabbit]

All three flights I mentioned are carried by United

Click to shrink...

Well on a cursory google I see 5 airlines with a route from BA to Las Vegas, with the cheapest one being COPA at $800 for a flight on Thursday
Whereas a BA to Houston flight I see United as the cheapest at $1200
So the mere presence of Copa in the first route drives down prices for the competitors like United

All this shit is manager by insanely sophisticated economics algorithm so they can get as much $$ as possible and fill as many seats as they can

 

[Minx]

Supply and demand.

 

[shnurgleton]

"I dunno, how much you willing to pay"

but actually

 

[ISOM]

Businesses charge what they can get away with, see Apple.

 

[Deleted member 39374]

iTs GrEeD

Actually it's market demand + jet fuel costs + costs of maintaining a fucking plane + payroll for everybody involved + costs to maintain regulatory compliance so you don't die + all the taxes and fees in your bill as well + a little bit of profit so there's a purpose for running the place

Airlines actually don't make that much money

 

[turtle553]

Non-stop flights are more in demand and more expensive. So booking a flight where your target city is a connecting city can be cheaper than just the direct flight. Skiplagged.com will give you the options to just get off and miss your connection, but the airline may ban you for doing it.

 

[Master Of Illusion]

Take macro economics.

 

[cvxfreak]

City pair trumps distance and number of connections.

In my case, two city pairs highly relevant in my life are Tokyo-HND-LAX and HND-SFO. (Or from NRT, but no sane person would choose Narita over Haneda).

Tokyo-LA has 9 flights a day. Tokyo-SF has 4 (5 if you include a single flight from San Jose).

Often, Tokyo-SF can be $1500 while Tokyo-LA can be as low as $600 (Tokyo-SF might connect in LAX and Tokyo-LA might connect in SFO). Why? Because demand on Tokyo-SF relative to supply means the market can support nearly or more than double the price of Tokyo-LAX.

The solution to the above problem is simply to book SFO-LAX and LAX-HND on separate tickets. Airlines usually don't mind but the gap between tickets needs to be large enough to work. The same airline/airline alliance is favorable in case of delays. Your mileage may vary.

Another example: LA-Shanghai is often much cheaper than LA-Tokyo.