alt Hacker NewsMy point is that it's totally unclear to me that that's how this happened. There were at least a few airlines that did not say "we're gonna try the same", such as People Express Airlines and ValuJet, which explicitly tried to market themselves as fair, cheap, and transparently priced. Those airlines don't exist anymore. They went out of business, mostly because the other airlines used sophisticated pricing schemes to sabotage them. Maybe this was a failure of antitrust. It's certainly much more complicated than "all the airlines colluded together". Given the fact that the surviving airlines were never able to reach a particularly profitable "recoupment phase" of the predatory pricing process, it seems that this did not actually result in unfair prices on average (although business customers obviously get shafted every time).
In other words, modern airlines gouge certain customers, but effectively subsidize others. I would be unambiguously outraged only if they were gouging everyone and making fat stacks.
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> Maybe this was a failure of antitrust.
It's a failure of customer protections laws. The same service legally should cost each customer the same. Sophisticated pricing schemes should be just plainly illegal.
You can't put an item in the store on the shelf and charge every customer what you like. You have to put up a price and adhere to that price regardless of who wants to buy. Anything else is illegal. Or at least should be.
> I would be unambiguously outraged only if they were gouging everyone and making fat stacks.
No, the thing they're doing is still awful.
The basic problem is that they do actually have competitors and are offering a product which is basically fungible, so their margins are inherently going to suck, even if they do every slimy thing, because then their competitors will just do the same thing and they're back to having thin margins only now they've made everything more deceptive/inconvenient/confusing.
The ideal thing in a market like that is to have an efficient way for customers to cut through the BS and find the best price for a ticket that isn't screwing them in covert ways, because then the deceptive tactics don't work, which takes away the incentive to do them. They'll still have thin margins, only with less deception.
But an individual airline can't unilaterally allow that if their competitors have a way to block it or they'd be at a competitive disadvantage, so they're going to try to stop that from happening. It's in no one's interest -- not even theirs -- to let them. They just need you to not let their competitors get away with it either.