It's already a regulated market. If we want to stop fare practices we do not agree with then mandating specific bundling in luggage, legroom, food and credit/rebook is available as a regulation. And of course the economic arguments against it, and legal/philosophical.
>If we want to stop fare practices we do not agree with then mandating specific bundling in luggage, legroom, food and credit/rebook is available as a regulation.
Let's take the one of the items as an example: I rarely rebook, so I'm presumably benefiting from this price discrimination. Why should I support that it be forcibly bundled? I might be sympathetic to having some sort of baseline fare for advertising purposes, so it's not a race to the bottom to get the lowest sticker price, but I can't see how it's justified to limit consumer choice by disallowing the sale of restricted fares.
I'm not saying you're wrong but this is also much the same argument as "why do I pay more tax when I am not using public health" or other community wide benefits. Philosophically you either believe in a price which benefits the community at large, or you want the lowest price outcome for yourself and others to be exposed to their costs.
I think then you have to provide a strong argument for why a particular product/service should be considered under the "community-wide benefit" umbrella.
Public health is very clearly to me a collective good: I benefit from others being healthy in so many ways. Similar things can be said about funding schools; I don't have children, but I will benefit from the next generation of adults being well-educated. Welfare and supportive housing reduces crime and general dirtiness and decay where I live, so I'm happy that my taxes go toward that (I want more going toward that, honestly). I don't need to make arguments involving empathy to prove these things make sense, which is good when there are so many people not motivated by empathy.
But I'm not sure affordable flights is a public good. Certainly I want air travel to be accessible to more people; it shouldn't be the kind of thing only well-off people can do. (When I was a kid in the 80s/90s, we didn't have the money to fly, which limited our vacation choices.) But I'm not convinced that regulation should aim to "redistribute" cost so that people like myself should pay more for flights so others can pay less; that doesn't feel like it benefits me or the "public", really.
In general, though, I think the market is actually working for once. Airlines have unbundled a lot of things, and then there's basic economy as well. Even with airline consolidation, (inflation-adjusted) fares are pretty low, and if you want a basic economy fare, or even a regular economy fare (but without checked baggage or refunds or changes), you can get a pretty good price.
Thats a fair point. I think you may be right this falls on the test of public interest, where minimum seat dimensions and exit/emergency safety doesn't.
I don't personally LIKE LCC and the unbundling, I tend to believe evidence that when you are driven to LCC pricing and then factor back in the unavoidable costs it can be more expensive than the cheaper bundled product from mainlines.
Maybe the limit of regulatory control here should be "final total cost must be shown before committing" so that all taxes, airport levies, state charges, and other unavoidable costs (card processing fees?) are shown in the pricing, because I am led to believe a $99 fare can wind up $150 or more once all the unavoidable extras in that price are factored in.
There are very good reasons to not let people rebook for free, and that's why more and more booked services are splitting their offers in refundable and non-refundable rates. It's to reward the actual clients who stick with their reservation, rather than those who book a bunch of stuff that they are only going to cancel later.
>Philosophically you either believe in a price which benefits the community at large, or you want the lowest price outcome for yourself and others to be exposed to their costs.
How does the community benefit when there's only one price for airfare, and there isn't any mechanism for the poor to save a buck? I rarely rebook tickets, probably because I rarely fly for work, so I can book tickets months in advance. I suspect it's the same for most vacationers, so they're benefiting from this policy, likely at the expense of people who need to cancel last minute (corporate flyers?). The same goes for meals. Is it really that hard to pack a lunch that we need to mandate free lunches for everyone?
The poor don't save a buck when they next need to fly and are exposed to excess costs because of not being able to buy the bucket price seat. The mechanistic way this usually exposes is "only six seats at this price" and they went milliseconds after release.
You truly believe you're right and frustratingly I truly believe you're wrong AND I'm lazy and don't want to prove it or convince you. It's just what I think. Your examples are good. There are equally good rebuttals you could steelman for yourself if you wanted to.
>The poor don't save a buck when they next need to fly and are exposed to excess costs because of not being able to buy the bucket price seat. The mechanistic way this usually exposes is "only six seats at this price" and they went milliseconds after release.
Taking this at face value, it means the airline severely underpriced their fares, because it was snapped up very quickly, which indicates there were people willing to pay more that didn't have the chance. This definitely has implications for equity (eg. if you're not working a desk job you might not be able to spam refresh to snap up those airfares), but I'm not too concerned about it because airlines are incentivized to fix the problem.
More importantly I don't think this problem even exists. Nowadays if you try to book a ticket, you'll be presented with a menu of options, with different fare restrictions. I don't think I've ever saw a situation where a discounted fare was only available for basic economy, for instance. You could always pay more or less for the different tiers within economy.
Because your ticket that includes it will be the same price as the ticket you're getting now that excludes it. That was broadly the point of the article— the lowest tier fares didn't get cheaper, you just had to pay more to get what you had before.
