We’ve seen an increasing willingness of airlines to charge a premium for solo travelers, but I’ve just found a rather egregious example in which you can save $75 and enjoy twice as much space by buying a second seat on the same American Airlines flight. That’s right, not only are two seats cheaper than one, but the savings are real…

Airlines Penalize Solo Travelers: An Example

I travel from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh from time to time for work and American Airlines flies nonstop. I was looking at traveling on July 8th and AA was asking $424 for a one-way ticket in economy class:

But when I changed the passenger count from one to two, the price dropped to $175 each…for the same flight on the same day:

This wasn’t just a penalty or traveling solo (or, as airlines spin it, a discount for traveling with a companion), but more than twice the price! Nearly 2.5X more expensive. What kind of logic underpins a fare structure that can save you money by buying an extra seat on the same flight?!

Per aviation insider JonNYC, this is a policy AA calls P2 and it impacts select markets:

I get (I guess…) a slight “discount” for buying two tickets on the same flight, but making two cheaper than one strikes me as particularly punitive.

While this happens to be a very extreme example, this “news” is actually nothing new. I first noticed it in a Dan’s Deals forum earlier this year (in that case, a United flight from Newark – Cleveland was significantly more expensive if only buying one ticket versus two). But it has been widely covered by my colleagues and I do think it merits more coverage…and scrutiny.

Interestingly, I just spent some time trying to replicate this on United and Delta and was unsuccessful (even though I see many examples on other blogs that were available yesterday but are no longer available today), so perhaps airlines are rethinking this practice with a barrage of media scrutiny coming.

It’s true that business travelers are often willing to pay more for travel (because they are using “other people’s money”) and are more likely to travel solo, but rewarding people for buying two tickets instead of one to save money strikes me as a perverse incentive. Maybe AA and others think that since corporate travel policies would likely prohibit buying two tickets, the business traveler would be forced to buy one seat even if she could save her company money by buying a second seat on the same flight?

CONCLUSION

Mark this story as developing for now, but it appears we are geting just a bit closer to the sort of dynamic inventory pricing in which every passenger may get a different price based on their IP address, whether they are logged ino their loyalty account, or even based on how often they have searched for a particular flight or routing.

Have you seen this before? Does it make sense to charge less for two tickets than one?