eli5: Why are flights with a layover in a certain city sometimes cheaper than flights to that same city?

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Let’s say for example I live in Los Angeles and a United airlines flight from LAX to JFK with a layover in DFW is $500 but that same flight from LAX to DFW is $600. How did I save $100 by adding an extra flight?

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9 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s usually because any flight with a layover is cheaper than a direct flight, even if the direct flight is one leg of the flight with a layover. The layover allows the airline to fly more passengers through more airports than the direct flight, so it’s still worth it to discount layover flights.

Anonymous 0 Comments

This is just a case of what’s known as “price discrimination”, in which sellers charge different buyers different amounts for the same thing, based on what they think the different buyers will pay.

To your example, imagine there are only two airlines. One flies the LAX->DFW route and the DFW->JFK route. The other airline flies LAX->JFK by way of ORD.

The first airline cannot charge you too much for the flight to JFK because if they do, you’ll just choose the flight by way of ORD. But since they’re the *only* ones who fly to DFW, if that’s your terminal stop, they can charge you *more*.

Anonymous 0 Comments

People take flights for both relatively short routes and very long routes. For example, Austin, TX to Dallas, TX is only a few hundred miles and you spend barely half an hour in the air.

So trying to decide what flights to have and how many of each flight to have is like a strategy game airlines play. If a flight is mostly empty, they either lose money or make a lot less than if it’s full. If a popular route has too few available flights, they lose money because people use other airlines.

So having a flight that goes Austin -> Dallas -> Somewhere lets them be a little more flexible than having one direct Austin -> Somewhere. Maybe Austin->Somewhere routes don’t frequently fill up, but Austin->Dallas is more likely to fill. And maybe more people fly Dallas->Somewhere overall. That means the airline makes a little more money if they DON’T have a direct flight, because they can schedule more flights closer to capacity between the three destinations.

But layovers are inconvenient and raise the probability of trouble, so some travelers want to avoid them. So for certain routes, if the airline charges a premium fee for a direct flight they can make up for the “loss” of the plane not as commonly being at capacity. From the customer side, it feels like you’re paying extra for less hassle, which is generally seen as a fair trade.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because the airlines care about marginal cost. The two primary forms of airline travelers are businessmen and tourists. Tourists want to save time and businessmen aren’t paying their own ticket. Those groups don’t care if it costs more and will always fill the direct flights. But there will still be flights that aren’t getting filled. By accepting a layover, you fill two or more flights that were likely low demand flights and would not have been filled by those other two forms of travelers.

Now the airlines calculates the cost of you flying. Just the cost of one additional passenger is a very low almost nonexistent cost if that flight would not have elsewise been filled. And so they offer it cheaper hoping it will be filled by those who don’t mind, leaving room on higher demand direct flights.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because you inconvenienced yourself by having to stop in between where you left from and your destination.

It also increases the revenue of the airline by adding in new customers.

Say a non-stop flight from point A to point C can carry 100 passengers. That’s just 100 tickets sold.

Now you add in a midway stop at point B.

So you have 100 tickets sold for the flight guaranteed, but 30 people get off at point B and 30 new people get on at point B heading for point C.

That flight now sold 130 tickets.

For you the customer wanting to travel from point A to point C, you have to deal with the slight inconvenience of sitting at point B while people get off and on. But the airline increases it’s revenue because they are able to service more customers.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Airline flight prices are absurdly inconsistent in so many ways, and ultimately come down to what they think you’ll pay, not what it’s actually worth.

On that note, I worked with a guy who travelled nearly year round, and was always booking flights. He said that if you are booking a round-trip flight from A->B then B->A, if you have a layover each way, you can book A->X->B, B->A->Y, where Y can be anything which is cheaper than just B->A, and then skip the A->Y leg . But don’t try it on the first half, because if you skip X->B the airline usually assumes you are a no-show and will cancel the rest of your itinerary.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The price of a product isn’t just about what it costs the company. It’s also about what customers are WILLING to pay. A direct flight between two major cities is more convenient, so people are willing to pay a premium, especially business travellers who value time.

It’s why Apple phones cost so much. Or Dominoes pizza. Their products don’t cost any significant amount more than their competitors’ products to manufacture. You’re paying a premium so you can have THAT product.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Airlines will try to charge what they can. They care about overall profits. Airlines know that people prefer direct flights to flights with layovers. So their reasoning is: we can charge more for direct flights. In your case, try comparing your LAX-JFK flight with the layover in DFW, to a direct flight from LAX to JFK. If you can find a good like-for-like comparison (or average multiple flights on these two routes), you’ll probably find that the direct flight is more expensive.

The fact that they end up pricing the flight-with-layover more cheaply than a ticket for just one leg of that route is just a byproduct that airlines don’t care about, as the flight with layover is not *supposed* to be an option for passengers whose destination is the layover airport. It used to be almost impossible to exploit until the advent of online booking and automated search engines for flights. Once people were able to search these “hidden-city” flights out pretty easily, it became more of an issue for airlines, but even then this was (and remains) only an option for passengers flying without checking any luggage (or even carrying hand luggage items that have risk of being gate-checked). And these days airlines are taking extra steps to prevent people from doing this. It’s usually expressly forbidden in their terms and conditions, and if you get caught, you might get sued, the airline might kick you out of their frequent-flyer program, and so on. Also, note that you will be a no-show for the next flight, which may delay that flight as they may choose to wait for you (a short while), and if you booked a return flight, they might cancel your ticket.

All in all, some people apparently do exploit this loophole, but it’s only a small minority, and for many people it will not be worth the hassle or the risk. Which, to cut a long story short, means that the comparison you’re making is irrelevant to airlines.

Anonymous 0 Comments

outside of the usual ” they charge what they can get away with” the idea is that airlines want ot ensure their planes are as close to full as possible at all times as a plane that has ot make a trip from A to B at half capacity is potentially losing money.

but if they were ot instead go from A to B but make a stop at X where you get more ppl wanting to board allows you to sell tickets for the flight as ” going to B and ” going to X”

the people that intend to go for the latter will buy the flgiht and once they get there these seats are freed up ot take customers from X that also want ot go to B.

thru this whole process the airline managed ot potentially sell more tickets for that one flight than the planes has places and all it costed them was the inconvinience of making the trip take longer for the customers wanting the direct A-B path(whic hthey compensate by making the indirect flight cheaper).

TLDR: you get a discount for being willing to deal with the inconvinience while you pay full price for the “risk” the airline takes on ensuring your seat in a direct flight(in the event you no show and the airline cannot fill).