Opinion: After Solo Flyer Fare Blowup, It’s Time for More Transparency

On Thursday, we confirmed all three of the nation's largest airlines were charging some solo travelers significantly higher fares than groups of two or more, pushing the story into national headlines and causing outrage on social media. By Friday evening, both Delta and United had backtracked, pulling the fares that pushed single passengers into a higher price point.

Even with enormously powerful, “too-big-to-fail” airlines, accountability is possible. Now, it's time for a little bit more transparency. 

This airfare pricing saga isn't over yet. As of publication Monday afternoon, American Airlines was still selling single tickets at an egregious premium on a handful of domestic routes. And while Delta and United have stopped doing so, they're instead currently charging everyone the higher fares – likely a temporary measure to head off even more bad press and to protect themselves against the inescapable conclusion that they were overcharging solo and business travelers to begin with.

But this story struck a chord, precisely because it reinforced how many travelers already feel about the companies that fly us across the country and even around the globe. After decades of nickel and diming travelers, everyday Americans trust airlines about as far as they can throw a Boeing 737.

Last week, they hit a breaking point – and for that, the carriers have no one to blame but themselves.

 

A Primer on Problematic Pricing

Part of the problem is that sites like ours don't do a good enough job explaining exactly what goes into determining the price you pay for a flight – and airlines certainly don't. Let's change that. 

Airlines are not Costco or Target, and plane seats are certainly not gallons of milk or packages of meat with clearly advertised, (relatively) stable pricing. Bulk pricing discounts are not a thing for plane tickets – at least not typically. 

How airlines set prices is enormously and impenetrably complex, with prices that sometimes seem to change by the second. Airlines make matters worse by constantly rebranding their ticket types or imposing new policies and restrictions. Two of them – Delta and American – arguably engage in a form of bait-and-switch pricing.

It's all a black box to everyday consumers, giving rise to conspiracy theories that airlines are tracking your searches and that clearing your cookies or using a VPN is the key to savings. The reality is at once more innocent and yet harder to understand. 

Forget about just selling the economy, extra legroom, and first class seats you see on each plane at different prices. Airlines use an alphabet soup of fare classes – literally, there are 26-plus of them – each with their own rules, restrictions, benefits, and, most importantly, price. 

 

 

That alone explains why a price might change hours, even minutes, after your initial search. It's not that the airline was tracking your search – there was simply only one “fare class E” ticket at $199. If a fellow passenger beats you to check out (or the airline decides to simply pull that fare class), you automatically get bumped up to the next-best $229 seat in “fare class V.” 

Airlines have entire departments whose sole purpose is to leverage that system in order fill planes at the highest ticket prices as possible. To do so, they also “segment” their customers by charging different prices to different people – after all, airlines know a business traveler paying with a corporate card will gladly pay more for the same flight than a family of four going on an annual vacation. 

Before it backfired, airlines tried to combine those two elements – adjusting fare classes and using segmentation – to weaponize their fares against solo business travelers and charge them higher prices. 

Airlines know the average consumer won't read their terms and conditions, let alone the arcane fare rules: thousands of words spelling out all the rules and regulations that make travelers eligible for a flight at a specific price. That's where they quietly wrote new rules into their lowest-priced tickets, specifying that an adult “must be accompanied on all sectors … by at least 1 adult” in order to book it.

 

 

That was the trigger for this penalty on solo travelers. Search for just one passenger, and you'd skip right past this $139 economy fare from Chicago-O'Hare (ORD) to Asheville (AVL)…

 

 

… and instead only see the option book the exact same flight for nearly twice the price. 

 

 

That's the same reason why United and Delta fares both stuck at stubbornly high prices after they reversed course. Pulling those fares with two-passenger requirements was the quickest solution to change the story heading into the weekend – and, perhaps more importantly, to try to head off the undeniable conclusion that they were penalizing solo travelers.

Which is exactly what they were doing. 

 

How Airlines Screwed Up

I can hear it now from the plugged-in, diehard aviation crowd – in fact, I've heard plenty of it already: “This is nothing new! Airlines have been using ticket rules to charge travelers different prices for decades!”

And that's true. Seven-day stay requirements would hit business travelers doing an out-and-back with higher fares while granting vacationers going on a weeklong trip a lower fare on the exact same flight. Twenty-one day booking requirements would penalize procrastinating flyers booking a last-minute trip for work.

But if you ask me, there was something fundamentally different about this tactic. For starters, not all single passengers are paying with a corporate card: There are also solo travelers, friends planning a group trip together (but booking airfare separately), and family members who need to rush off to attend to a medical emergency.

Sure, a family member flying for an emergency could try to return home at a later date to save. Travelers heading off on a special solo trip could book further in advance next time in order to get a better deal. 

But they can't clone themselves. This time, solo travelers were boxed out from savings.

It's unclear exactly how long airlines used this pricing tactic. And, at the time we discovered it last week, it was relatively limited in scope: We found it being used on dozens of domestic routes, always one-ways. 

But this is the airline industry we're talking about. Left unchecked, does anyone really doubt whether it would have expanded? I'm old enough to remember when basic economy fares were just a test. Now, they're unavoidable.

Most importantly: This wasn't a discount for groups. It was a price increase for solo travelers.

 

 

Much like the “buy two gallons, get one free” special at your grocery store, companion discounts are certainly a thing in air travel. But those are advertised. This was not. 

Airlines could have made the case that their latest failed pricing tactic would be a win for couples, families, and groups. And heck, maybe that would have been the case in the long run. Airlines didn't do that: Instead, they quietly snuck new terms into their fare rules and declined to comment when we noticed – and declined again after they stripped them out. They still haven't said a word on the record about this.

But even if airlines were truly planning on cutting groups a deal – a stretch, given the airline industry’s decades-long track record – it still begs the question: Why should companions and families benefit from the lowest fares while solo and business travelers see ticket prices that are 40%, 70%, or even 100% higher?

I'm not a lawyer. I don't know whether there's a legal case here. Given the ever-changing nature of flight prices (see above), proving you wound up paying more for your plane ticket than a couple or family could be a major challenge.  

But just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right. Transparency and fairness are both good foundations of any business, if you ask me.

Airlines failed on both counts last week.

 

A Modest Proposal for (Literally Any) Transparency

Airlines like Delta and United brag about about about building lifelong, meaningful relationships with their passengers. This was a funny way of showing how they really feel about their customers.

I think there’s a lesson for airlines here. Even an ounce of additional transparency from the airlines about how they charge passengers and why would have done wonders. Instead, they stayed radio silent, allowing thousands (maybe even millions) of Americans to fill in the blanks with their own assumptions. 

But no time like the present, right? This story and the nationwide response shows it's time for airlines to be more forthcoming. Trust might be at an all-time low – and understandably so.

Ben Schlappig from One Mile at a Time – easily one of the most knowledgable writers in all things airlines and travel – argues that transparency is, in essence, a slippery slope: That this kind of pricing rule is what leads to the deals that travelers love; that savvy travelers can benefit by understanding and exploiting these practices; and that transparent pricing practices would only make that harder.

I respect Ben a ton. I just disagree in this case. Turning transparency into an all-or-nothing – and pitting cheap travel lovers against those who understandably want more clarity – is a pretty good way to ensure things never get better for everyday travelers.

 

 

If there's one thing that drives flight deals – whether you're booking a cheap fare or redeeming points – it's competition between carriers. If there are two things, the second is the simple law of supply and demand. So long as we've got both, we're in good shape for a future full of flight deals.

Plus, I think informed consumers are more likely to become the loyal customers airlines crave. Ask yourself: When's the last time you were a rushed to return to a store or restaurant after feeling like you got hosed? 

Transparency is not an absolute. More transparency is better than none – and you won't find an industry with less transparent pricing than the airline business.

There's plenty of room for improvement without airlines giving away the entire game. This certainly isn't a call for a return to full federal regulation of the airlines we last saw in the late 70's, which would absolutely upset the delicate balance of competition between carriers and lead to higher fares.

I don't have all the answers yet – and considering I've never run (or even worked at) an airline, I probably never will. But four ideas come to mind:

• Airlines could help educate customers about how airfare prices are actually set. We're doing our best, but airlines have tremendous reach to inform the public that dwarfs any site or forum like ours.
• More prominently display the full fare rules during the booking process. Some do better than others, but all of them could do a better job. With Delta, for example, you have to click a nondescript “Changeable/Nonrefundable” link (and then click twice more) to get the full rules for a flight you're buying.
• Publish a full list of fare types and their general restrictions – something you can currently only get from an (outdated) third-party website. These rules will surely change over time, but this is a start and a major improvement over the current surface-level breakdown of fares most U.S. airlines publish.
• Commit to not re-imposing fare rules that push single passengers into pricier or more restrictive fares. Even for the airlines, this was a bridge too far. 

 

 

None of them is a silver bullet, and airlines can (and should) do far more. None of them require an act of Congress or the President. Many of these solutions rely on consumers reading more of the fine print in order to make an informed choice. But isn't it better to put more information at consumers' fingertips and put the onus on them to understand what they're buying … rather than simply staying silent?

Look, running an airline is unquestionably a brutal business, with razor-thin margins and monumental expenses on everything from employees to the airplanes they fly to the fuel that goes inside them. But airlines have also been handed the keys to turn the some of the nation's most important infrastructure into a for-profit enterprise – and that American taxpayers bailed out to the tune of $54 billion to survive the pandemic. 

I think we can all ask for more from them. And we should.

 

Bottom Line

Just when you think airlines can't possibly stoop any lower, they found a horrifically creative new way to squeeze more money out of us – some of us, anyway. 

The reaction to this week’s news is a reflection of that deep mistrust. If airlines do nothing, it'll only get worse.