For years airlines have been guilty of squeezing the last penny out of the passenger pocket without publicly increasing the price. How do they manage to achieve this, well they achieve it through what is known as "price discrimination".
What is price discrimination?
Price discrimination is a pricing strategy whereby identical or largely similar goods or services are sold at different prices by the same provider to different buyers.
In this case people are charged differently for the same seat in an airplane, for instance if you book a ticket at the last minute it costs twice as much as someone who booked much earlier.
It's also a fact that many people pay less for a holiday ticket than those business men who have an early morning Monday meeting to catch.
This practice has been on for years which means airlines have been practicing the same tactics for decades but recently it seems that they want to strategize and form new tactics.
The question is what is this new tactic?
This new tactic is simply charging a solo traveller more or charging passengers who travel alone more than those who don't.
From recent analysis fares are higher when only one seat is selected during booking. Here's the catch
Business travellers mostly travel alone than families going for vacation or travelling together and coupled with the fact that business travellers careless about prices since their aim is the destination.
With this simple logic Airlines can increase prices without publicly doing so.
Since airlines operate in a very thin profit margin any opportunity to increase increase income in a cleaver way is welcomed.
As a Solo traveler the easiest way to navigate this when booking flight is to search for two seats instead of one and compare the price per seat in respect to when you select only a seat.
You can also book early to avoid late booking increase.