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> If airlines didn’t want to play pricing games, they could stop playing pricing games. List a standard fare for a route if you want to sell fares at a standard rate. If you want to try and squeeze me for an extra $20 because I’m buying during work hours, or $100 because I visited your site 5 days ago and now you think I’m desperate then you don’t get to complain when I use underhanded tactics to get the best deal. They make the rules, they shouldn’t be surprised when their convoluted system gets exploited by people that know the rules.

Nicely put.

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Morally sure, but they absolutely are going to complain even if they're in the wrong about it. And they'll try and ban things and stop you from getting the deal obviously. Why wouldn't they? Have you ever known airlines to deal fairly?

They make the rules, and so they'll try to do that again.

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They did offer it. Now they only offer it to humans. They have no interest in games, only in making money.
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And I have no interest in their pricing games, only saving money.
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Claude cannot occupy a seat. An airline seat is only used by humans.

If they aren't interested in games they could publish a set fare for a set route. Instead they have 4 or more fare classes visible to end users and more in the backend leading to opaque unpredictable pricing, they gamify the experience using literal points and rewards, they constantly change prices, they charge fees for services that vary depending on fare class, what credit card you purchased the ticket with, what credit card you currently hold, how many times you've flown in the past year, how many miles you've flown, how many dollars you've spent to fly those miles. I'm not sure they could make it more of a game (BTW, games are not in opposition to making money, they frequently enable making more money. Exhibit A is airlines. Game theory textbooks use them as examples).

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