Price discrimination lets airlines price first class tickets above cost so coach tickets can be priced at marginal cost.
Economy tickets aren’t prices at marginal cost. The first available economy seats are priced at a base rate. As the plane fills up, economy seat prices increase. Then the original economy passengers are bombarded with emails and texts asking them to upgrade to premium, when higher class tickets go unsold.
There’s also a secondary market for tickets exploited by resellers (Expedia, etc) that buy up tickets in advance and try to leverage corporate discounts for a profit.
But all of this ultimately making flying more confusing, more difficult, and less flexible (it’s basically impossible to cancel a ticket now), due to all the middle men playing hot potato with unsold tickets.
The “optional play” for flying is to just go to the airport and gamble on standby tickets, which require you to have far more free time than free cash. If you need to keep a schedule, this is a horrible model.
dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Airlines are the worst example of this that I know of.
It’s not just the rich they will target.
They (including everyone) will and do use this technology along with data they harvest from you (from other parts of your online life) to make you pay as much as you can to get things you need.