Airlines are wierd.

[dagibbs]

I'm looking at a potential climbing trip to the Swiss alps this summer.

I don't know where I'm going to fly into, but I'm looking at either Geneva or Zurich. And, I'm looking at flying out of Montreal (since I'll be coming back just before Anticipation).

Apparently for 60K miles, I can fly YUL-GVA-ZHR and ZHR-GVA-YUL. But, if I just want to fly YUL-GVA and GVA-YUL that will cost me 86K miles. It takes the exact same flights on the YUL-GVA-YUL segment. Yet, to fly a shorter distance, using fewer seats and less gas and luggage handling will cost 40% more.

[edit for clarity: the shorter route is a proper subset of the longer. Exact same flights, just the longer one adds more stuff to the end (going)/start(returning) of the other route. ]

I don't understand.

(P.S. when are they going to convert to air-kms?)

Comments

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

The longer route complete includes the shorter route. So, if shorter route is full, then the longer route should, also, be full at the lower price point. And, I refreshed the shorter route after getting the price on the longer route just to make sure the last "cheap" seat on the shorter route hadn't gone away. Nope.

It isn't that we're looking at, say, two different routes to the same place -- long or short. It is that the longer completely follows the shorter, then goes onwards, but is still cheaper.

[http://users.livejournal.com/niall_/]

I think that there's a set of cheap seats for the direct flight, and a second set of cheap seats for the connection flights, so you have two categories of 60k seats on YUL-GVA. Could be the direct cheap seats are already taken, but fewer people want to go all the way to Zurich, and some of those are currently available.

I know someone who used to be a travel agent, and it's stuff like this which makes it difficult to become one. On one hand, it's maddeningly logical in an almost mathematical manner (as was mentioned, to maximise profits from tiny margins); and on the Average Traveller's hand, it looks insane...