Air passengers may pay 8 times as much as their seatmates, study finds

On a recent vacation trip to Canada, Gina Kano couldn’t help thinking that she probably paid more for her ticket than other passengers on the plane.

“And there is no way to know why,” the marketing executive from Los Angeles said. “Is it just luck? When there is no logical reason, it’s very annoying.”

A new study has confirmed what Kano and many airline travelers have long suspected: On any given flight, passengers can pay twice as much as others in the same cabin section, and even as high as eight times more.

The study, based on millions of air fares analyzed by the travel-planning site Hopper.com, looked a several domestic flights taken in early May, including a United Airlines flight from Los Angeles International Airport to Las Vegas. On that flight, one-way fares ranged from less than $200 to more than $1,600 for coach seats.

The study also found that some airlines have a greater mix of prices than others. To gauge the disparity, Hopper calculated the percentage of fares that varied from the base fare on that flight.

Fares varied the least on Spirit Airlines (5%) and Virgin America (15%), while larger carriers like United Airlines had 18% variability, according to the study.

The prices seem to vary less on flights to popular vacation destinations, such as Hawaii, because leisure travelers are more sensitive to price and are quick to cancel a trip if air fares are too high, according to Hopper’s chief data scientist Patrick Surry.

Meanwhile, flights to popular business destinations such as Washington, D.C., and Chicago have greater price variability because business travelers must make those trips regardless of price, he said.

But Surry said further studies are needed to determine why prices vary so much between flights and airlines.

“This is something we’ll be digging into in more detail,” he said.

To read more about travel, tourism and the airline industry, follow me on Twitter at @hugomartin.