? Not a complaint, I don't even have kids. But if it was $99 for the ride (regardless of people) then it's more price efficient for a family flying compared to the hundreds it costs after their promotional pricing.
I'm very much in this camp. Two weeks ago, my 6 member family took a flight on Frontier, one of the discount airlines, from Philadelphia to South Florida. The seats didn't even recline! But don't take that as a complaint, the fact that we paid $611.79 for 6 round trip tickets (and 2 checked bags) makes up for the slightly less comfortable trip and no pretzels.
Fares like that make flying possible for so many more people now. If we had to pay $200 or even $300/ticket (instead of $100) it would have made the trip unaffordable.
Ah, the family seating fee. I once paid close to $3k to reserve ajacent seats for my family on a 3 leg round trip. Prices varied from $80 to $200 per seat, in addition to the ticket. Was traveling with kids, wanted to make sure we were all together.
Then I started testing, and guess what? you end up together regardless. So fear based sales.
I think it's great, but honestly, placing it at 15€ would have made only a little difference to the consumer, who is already getting a lot for the value, and helped the railway operators a good deal. As a compromise the age of kids who can travel together with their parents for free could have been raised from 6 to 8 years.
Odd sort of ad-hominem. The pricing structure of airlines certainly wasn't determined by ad execs. What he points out is that it isn't so bad: it does much better at maximizing utility than having all the seats the same and most of them more expensive.
His point was that if the airline pricing system is not so bad (and I'm not agreeing with that), then having it apply to other high fixed cost, low marginal cost things--like his daughter's bus--might also not be so bad.
Of course, the example of his daughter's bus makes me wonder if the whole thing isn't tongue in cheek and I'm not getting it because I'm not British.
People SAY they want cheaper admission, while the same people would endlessly complain at the inevitable 2-3 hour per ride waits it would create. It's a classic supply and demand problem.
Would you pay half price for an international flight that had all the seats ripped out and standing room only, so you could barely move?
There is no "cost of doing business". You're asking that the riders without children cover the extra cost. It's an interesting proposition and we can of course discuss it, but please, for the sake of all that is rational and logic, don't pretend the money comes from thin air.
Isn’t the point made that it’s “cheap-ness” is based on VC subsidization of each ride? People can critique things without being envious, no need for the snark.
They're priced that way because they compete with shuttle flights, and most importantly, they are far from a normal "bus" experience - the images shown at https://vonlane.com/ are accurate IMO.
Sure, but if you were taking a family of 5, suddenly your $100 plane ticket turns into $500. Driving becomes much more competitive as soon as you start adding passengers to the vehicle.
The cost per person is indeed much more. That's why he's talking about charging everyone the cost of a first class ticket rather than offering the usual economy etc prices.
The price should be 20$+, there wasn't much middle ground, it is nice to have cheap rides for certain things but if the low cost option dominates, the whole model is unsustainable.
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