I used to own a couple of businesses and I successfully managed several others in my life. Therefore, I understand that the ultimate objective of any company is to make money. When companies appear to do this in an intentionally scammy manor and force their customers into a situation that is a pain in the butt – I’m afraid I have to disagree with their business practices. It becomes a much more irritating situation when you have no choice but to not use their services because all of their competitors do the same irritating thing.
I was unaware of this before leaving the USA, but all the other places in the world (that I have lived and know people from) for the most part it is possible to buy one-way tickets and more often than not this ticket is at least close to the half the price of a round-trip ticket to the same destination. Not in the USA. I was disappointed to find out the past few months that our stupid system of one-way tickets costing much more than half a round is still in place. There were several instances on this trip where I looked and found if I booked a round-trip ticket and simply didn’t use the second half of it, it was actually cheaper than buying a one-way ticket.
There were several other instances where I discovered that people in certain markets are intentionally being taken advantage of. This was more often than not true for any destination ending in New York City. I found out by accident that it is actually cheaper for me to buy a ticket on the same plane that is going to NYC, but instead of saying I am getting off there to say that I am transitioning to…. I dunno (and it doesn’t matter) St. Louis or Washington D.C. and the flight ends up being cheaper. Huh? So if I need to spend 2 more hours on this SAME PLANE operated by the SAME COMPANY I pay less? WTF is going on here?
If you ever find yourself needing to go to NYC have a look at this system because I looked quite a bit and found that in most instances the longer journey was cheaper provided there was a stopover in NYC. Ludicrous.
USA has this one wrong. Over in South East Asia if I book a round trip ticket, it is precisely the cost of two one-way tickets. They also don’t take advantage of last-minute travelers nearly as much as they do in USA. I had forgotten that America was this way and waited until my trip to Virginia was less than 10 days away. I had previously noted that this flight was less than $200, however the priced jumped to more than $500 once we get closer to the date. This happens overseas as well but not to DOUBLE the price.
these a-holes charge $100 for a carry on bag
I dunno what to say here. I guess maybe some people are more organized than I tend to be. There is also nothing you can do about it because it seems that all of the airlines use the exact same system so there is no real competition on service – which is a shame. I am all for free markets but this is one of the flaws of that notion. When there are only a few players in the game and they all agree to “price fix” so to speak, there isn’t really a whole lot that the consumers can do (except in this instance they could take a bus, which at one point is exactly what I did.)