This same effect is why individuals get charged so much for healthcare. It's really easy to leverage information asymmetry to make a ton of money, rule #1 is to never let the customer know how much things cost to you
Hotels aren't as good at this as airlines are. The airlines have more legal support enforcing that tickets are tied to an identity. Hotels can't check the IDs of everyone who goes into the room. And there are fewer airlines, so they have more data and more market power.
Hotels in general do check IDs of people when they check in.
Most rooms within a given hotel just aren't that different. (ADDED: And to the degree that a room of a given size with a King bed might have a better view/light than another room, large hotels basically make it about the luck of the draw.) The main price discrimination is based on date. Businesses will eat the $400+/night rooms in SF when there's a big event at the Moscone. (Though there are also room blocks and negotiated rates.) Individual tourists will, in many cases, just go a different week and/or scour the listings for an AirBnB that's hopefully a bargain and not a too good to be true.
Airlines have a lot of levers related to status and price-sensitivity for products (seats) that don't have markedly different costs to deliver. Airlines could presumably offer business class seating, even internationally, for much less of a markup than they do. But the average family going to see grandma probably isn't willing to pay even a 30% markup much less a 2x one. So you do different classes and even levels of service within classes.
There are also scenarios with airlines where the only way for a flight to turn a profit is to price discriminate. It's possible to have a demand curve such that if you choose any point on the demand curve as the price for everyone, total revenue is less than total cost. But if you price discriminate you can capture the full area under the curve and have revenue exceed cost.
Oh yeah, we don't have a choice in the matter in terms of healthcare. You'd need a much bigger actor without a financial interest in making you terrified to be involved. It's why insurance and pharma really don't want large state actors in the health space, they have a proportional amount of power to restrict prices to a reasonable amount
I think that is backwards. State actors want insurance in order to price segment/discriminate.
That is why Medicaid pays less than Medicare, or federal government employee coverage. Or Tricare for military or Medicare for old. The insurance company becomes the fall guy even though the payer is directing them to require more extensive prior auths for certain populations, or reduced reimbursement such that fewer providers are available.
Government leaders can then give different populations different levels of healthcare, while simultaneously claiming they are giving everyone healthcare.
I bet UK’s leaders are jealous now of the US’s leaders, since they have to answer questions about NHS that they cannot deflect onto third parties.
