Avianca -- a Colombian airline -- does this too. It's really irritating. They also jack up the prices if you're viewing it in COP vs USD, to the point where the price can vary by >50%.
Lots of places do price discrimination, but there's an honest way and a dishonest way to do it.
Honest way: "Here's a base price for the product; here are some extras (even if Veblen) that you can also get by giving us more money". Lots of video games do this (buy the presale premium edition, get some merch); streaming sites also do this (see Netflix's pricing tiers).
Dishonest way: "Here's your price." (Unsaid: it's different than Chad's price, but there is no way to know what factors make that distinction).
There's price discrimination, and there's airlines.
Airlines will tell you "An economy seat on this flight costs $100. There is 1 ticket left at this price." ; you'll think "Great!" and proceed to click into it, with the intent to buy at that price. You'll get to the part where you need to choose your (specific, not simply class of) seat on the plane, and the diagram will show no seats available: your only option will be to "upgrade" to a costlier seat. So, in reality, there weren't any seats at that price, and the whole "There is n seats at this price" thing was simple bait & switch meant to just wear you down into purchasing the more expensive seat.
I'm sure some of this is just scumminess, but there's also the possibility of concurrent access, and someone else booked while you were thinking. There's also the more likely issue where airlines often outsource inventory management[1] and they have to pay a fee per search for realtime inventory (and those searches are slow), so they cache a lot of things and only get realtime inventory when you're very close to booking; then they often do a very poor job of cache invalidation (because it's hard)
There's a lot of ways you could organize the data so it's less terrible, but all of those involve a lot more IT involvement than airlines want to invest it.
> but there's also the possibility of concurrent access, and someone else booked while you were thinking
You can restart the flow from scratch, and you'll still get "n seats available at this price", which rules out that it was booked while I was looking.
> so they cache a lot of things and only get realtime inventory when you're very close to booking; then they often do a very poor job of cache invalidation (because it's hard)
Yet the end result is the same: the consumer gets a bait and switch.
You're not wrong here, but what you point to is the problem: companies using "blame computers" as a way to abdicate responsibility for the problem.
> There's a lot of ways you could organize the data so it's less terrible, but all of those involve a lot more IT involvement than airlines want to invest it.
Precisely. One can look at it too as there is no penalty these days for screwing consumers over, so there's no economic impetus to do anything about it when it happens.
