Ask HN: Can someone please start groupon for airlines?

How does it make the airline more money to sell you a ticket at a lower price? Your question is framed in terms of a consumer that is already buying tickets at the current price; you need to find the consumer that isn't buying tickets at the current price.

I don't think this would work mgkimsal makes a good point. When you ring up to get a price for a ticket from a reseller, they actively log into the airlines system to get the current price. The price could change from minute to minute based on supply and demand.

The problem you have with group buying tickets to airlines is that they need to sell those tickets, you cannot reserve space without paying for it. An airline would not set you aside x amount of tickets in the hope that you sell it.

I have done a website for a company that offers group tickets to resellers, they deal with BA. BA do not deal with their own group tickets, they use a company who sort all the headache out. That company take the order on behalf of resellers and they can reserve the space.

To make this work, you would need to ensure you booked months in advance and you could actually fulfil the ticket needs if you do get enough people on board.

I like the idea, the logistics would be a nightmare though

I am not sure this would work because the airlines industry would rather have the seat be empty honesty. I have flown a lot and also have used passes. The airlines would rather have an empty seat than sell it for 50 bucks on a 200 dollar flight.

Plus, the airlines industry cannot afford this type of disruption. They are already holding on for dear life (the American based carriers at least)

What would be more interesting is being able to exchange tickets on a secondary listing but this would have to be a corporate venture.

priceline was a good start at this years ago, but failed to disrupt as much as I'd thought it would. You're typically buying only one ticket at a time.

What they could do is expand to groups. For example, if I could create a signup site for a particular trip (RDU->LAX) and get X people to purchase from my site, we'd all get the deal at $Y instead of $Z.

I think this would throw off the current models airlines live by. If you and I each buy the same ticket on the same route, even just a few hours apart, we may pay different prices, because of the complex pricing models airlines use. Group/demand pricing would seem to make sense, but it may shake up the status quo too much, and since they own the data and the product for sale, there's little that could be done. I suspect groupon may be in a financial position to approach airlines about this to test some ideas, but it's a pretty big change to existing systems for any airline to 'experiment' at that level.

I think this needs to be looked at a bit differently- instead of focusing on the ticket buyers (travelers), focus on the airlines. Help them fill those last minute seats, the ones that are still not sold 24 hours (or even less?) before a flight. I'm sure they'd want an easy way to put butts in those empty seats- an app that 1. notifies them when a seat is unsold 24 hours before a flight and 2. allows them to easily put it on sale to the last minute consumer. You may even be able to charge the airline for this service, instead of making money off a commission.

I think the best way to go about something like this, is charter flights.

http://www.charterflights.co.uk/faq.php?faqID=1#Q1

If you can get enough people to fill up the whole airplane, you can charter the whole flight. Then you can sell any excess seats to companies like charterflights.co.uk.

Effective price discrimination is a very tough goal to achieve. The airlines try their best to price discriminate as best as they can, to maximize their profits, but it's not always possible to sell all tickets in a flight at whatever price consumers are willing to pay. Everyone would wait till the very end then to book tickets.

I actually applied with a similar idea to summer batch and didn't get through. I think YC doesn't consider this viable. Besides, Google is probably going to be the one to dominate the space with their $700M ITA acquisition from last summer (the deal was cleared by court a month ago). Watch this video: http://www.google.com/press/ita/