The perils of selling air travel like an all-you-can-eat buffet

So yesterday’s post was on Spirit airlines and unbundling of air travel. Today, courtesy of the LA Times, we have a story of what happens when airlines let customers buy a bundle (The frequent fliers who flew too much, May 5). Specifically, the story is about American Airlines’ AAirpass program, which allowed holders unlimited travel. When [...]

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Update time! Apple & Uber

Today we’ve got a few short comments on things we have touched on over the past few months. We have had several posts in recent months on the travails of Apple and its manufacturing partner Foxconn. Now public radio’s Marketplace has a pair of stories on Foxconn’s factories — produced with a little more cooperation [...]

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Finally, something dynamic at Wrigley: The price of bleacher seats

It’s been almost three weeks since pitchers and catchers reported so it’s time to talk a little baseball. Specifically, it’s time for an update on how Major League teams are trying to separate fans from their dollars. The trend this year is dynamic pricing. This has been going on for a while. The Giants were [...]

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Fighting back against revenue management systems

A common complaint about the travel industry is that pricing is unfair. The guy in the seat next to you on the plane may have paid a hundred dollars less or a two hundred dollars more than you did. Airlines are well known to monkey with prices on a given route — and even on [...]

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Pulling the plug at Starbucks

This summer I added the Starbucks app to my phone and can now pay for lattes with it. This has had the unfortunate consequence of driving home just how much my family can spend on over-priced coffee as I now get multiple emails per week as the card paired with my phone gets reloaded. So far, [...]

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United and innovation: Fees are the best you can do? Really?

So here’s a Fortune interview with Jeff Smisek, CEO of United Continental, talking about innovation. So do baggage fees really count as innovation?

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Revenue management and concert tickets

So Ticketmaster wants to bring revenue management to a concert venue near you (Ticketmaster to Tie Prices to Demand, Apr 19, Wall Street Journal). This is in many ways long over due. Airlines and others have made a science out of pricing scarce resources in the past 20 years so it is not surprising that [...]

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Managing Cubs ticket sales

So the day I posted on scalping and LCD Soundsystem tickets, I got an email from the Cubs (I am the proud holder of position 88,950 on the Cubs season ticket holder waiting list). It offered a chance to jump the queue for single game tickets: I posted about this program last year and I [...]

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Discounting for back to school?

For those who never had their mom drag them to Sears to replace the school uniform pants you outgrew over the summer, the notion of back to school season as the second biggest shopping time of the year may seem weird. But it is and thus an important part of a retailer’s year. At this [...]

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Queueing theorists and environmentalists of the world, unite!

There is an interesting piece of news coming out of Stockholm which should be reassuring for the both queueing theorists and environmentalists around the world. Exactly 40 years ago appeared the first academic paper that tried to combined consumer behavior and queueing theory. The main idea of Naor’s paper was that a resource (in our [...]

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