{"id":182329,"date":"2015-10-17T21:05:00","date_gmt":"2015-10-18T02:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/10\/17\/scott-adams-called-this-confusopolies\/"},"modified":"2015-10-17T21:05:00","modified_gmt":"2015-10-18T02:05:00","slug":"scott-adams-called-this-confusopolies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/10\/17\/scott-adams-called-this-confusopolies\/","title":{"rendered":"Scott Adams Called This Confusopolies"},"content":{"rendered":"
In response to improvements in information and comparison shopping made available to the consumer through the Internet, the airlines have conspired to make their fare systems Byzantinely complex<\/a>.<\/div>\n

This may be why airlines are waging a war on travel websites. The tools available on these sites make it too difficult to f%$# the customers like a drunk sorority girl:<\/p>\n

<\/span> Once upon a time, there were reasonably well-known ways to pay less for your airfare. Airlines had rules governing ticket prices, those rules were consistent across airlines, and almost everybody knew what the rules were. (If you booked further in advance, the tickets were cheaper. If you stayed a Saturday night, the ticket would be cheaper. That kind of thing.)<\/span>

<\/span> Those days, however, are long gone. Airline tickets are no longer priced according to simple rules: they\u2019re dynamically priced according to insanely complex algorithms which, to the naked eye, make no sense at all. Cheap tickets still exist, of course\u2014the problem is that there\u2019s no reliable way of finding them. If you managed to luck into such a ticket a few weeks or months ago, good for you\u2014but don\u2019t for a minute expect that if you behaved exactly the same way today, then you would get a similar result.<\/span>

<\/span> A recent paper<\/a> by Symeon Meichanetzoglou, Sotiris Ioannidis, and Nikolaos Laoutaris sums up the current status quo: \u201ccomplexity asymmetry,\u201d they conclude, \u201cdefeated the web.\u201d The paper is based on a massive database of 1,449,349 flight tickets involving 63 destinations and 125 different airlines\u2014and finds that even the most common-sense rules of airline ticket pricing are regularly violated. <\/span>

<\/span> For instance, let\u2019s say you want to book a round-trip flight from Brussels to Stuttgart. The researchers studied six different airlines flying that route, with 619 different fares, and found that 24.5% of the time, it was cheaper to buy two one-way tickets (one from Brussels to Stuttgart, and one from Stuttgart to Brussels) than it was to buy a round-trip. And when they looked at airlines rather than routes, they found similar outliers: one Dutch airline was cheaper more than half the time when buying singles rather than round-trip tickets. (Especially, it seems, on the Frankfurt-Zurich route.)<\/span>

<\/span> \u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/span>

<\/span> A few years ago, Delta got in trouble<\/a> for showing higher prices to its frequent fliers than to everybody else; it blamed a \u201ccomputer glitch.\u201d Ever since then, conspiracy theories have abounded, especially among people who search for flights, find relatively cheap ones, and then find that the fares have suddenly increased when they decide to buy. Is it a good idea to use some kind of private browsing mode<\/a> when shopping for tickets, so that the airlines can\u2019t identify you and jack their prices accordingly?<\/span>

<\/span> The answer, frankly, is that although it won\u2019t hurt if you do that, you\u2019re going to end up outsmarted whatever you do. The airlines and flight search engines have infinitely more information than you do, and that information asymmetry is always going to work to their advantage. If you find a cheap fare, good for you; if you don\u2019t, it\u2019s not your fault. The system is rigged against you. The battle of consumers against the airlines is over. And the airlines have won. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are industries that hate their customers more than the airlines ***cough*** cable companies ***cough***, but this is a veritable rogues gallery of evil that they have joined.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In response to improvements in information and comparison shopping made available to the consumer through the Internet, the airlines have conspired to make their fare systems Byzantinely complex. This may be why airlines are waging a war on travel websites. The tools available on these sites make it too difficult to f%$# the customers like …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1007,1005,1060,970,997,1181],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aviation","category-business","category-computer","category-corruption","category-internet","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182329"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182329\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}