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Q. I was wondering if airlines have little elves that scour the nation for festivals, sporting events, and concerts and then deliberately jack up the price of airfare to any given city based on those events. A couple examples:
Round-trip San Diego to Austin for a Univ. of Texas home football game: $347
Round-trip San Diego to Austin any other weekend: $299
Round-trip San Diego to Austin for South By Southwest music festival: $404
Round-trip San Diego to Austin the following week: $365
It's almost like the airlines "know" about every major event happening on every city and jack up fares only on those particular weekends. I'm an avid marathoner and this happens to me all the time when I fly to different races around the country. Flights the weekend of a big race in that town are usually much higher. Is there really some loser at a desk somewhere researching EVERY major event in every city in America? If not, then the airlines are just psychic.
A. The airlines only sell so many seats at the cheapest fares and when those are sold, the next highest priced seats are sold, and so on. It's all done by sophisticated yield management software, not so much by elves these days. They did use elves back in the day, but they've all retired now, replaced like so many of us by computers. You'll be glad to know however that we still employ elves here at Airfarewatchdog. We don't use computer software to find and evaluate the fares we list.
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A marathon is 26.2 miles, not 21. So before you want to call people "morons" you should consider at least getting your facts straight first!
Our daughter had an internship in Washington this summer and I had limited availability to visit her. "Of course", my travel time was in early July, when fares were high, but we snagged first class seats for only 67% more miles than coach. The cash fare for first class was three and a half times the already high coach. The only problem is now my wife is spoiled and wants to go first class EVERYTIME. :-)
As for the distance in a marathon, glad to see that both Nirvana91 and 26.2 are NOT morons. It does sound more impressive, on this side of the 49th Parallel (and in Europe) to casually drop that you've just done a 42.2 km race. lol
Even to races such as NY, Chicago and Boston, deals can be had if purchased early enough. As mentioned by George, it is all yield management. Since most runners arrive and depart the same days, the cheap seats go fast. So you must book early and watch your emails from airfarewatchdog for bargains!
It's not quite true to say that it's "almost like the airlines "know" about every major event happening on every city". In fact, the airlines DO know about every major event happening "on" every city. They also "know" about Christmas and Thanksgiving. Crazy, no?!
And yes, there really is some loser at a desk somewhere, in fact hundreds of losers at desks all over the world, looking at something referred to as "the" "internet" and marking things on "calendars", and saying things like: "Hey! A bunch of morons who clearly have too much time and money on their hands are planning to fly to XXX city to run around for 21 miles. Let's jack up the fares!" And guess what? Those morons pay 'em.