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Airline tickets and hotels, too. You likely paid a different amount for your ticket than either of the people sitting (or staying) next 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.


Reminds me of some constraint programming example I read yesterday: https://mlabonne.github.io/blog/constraintprogramming/


I don't know, but I'd guess that the majority of hotel room-reservations (not necessarily guests) are for individual travelers.




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