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Saturday Night Stayovers Make No Sense
Ask Chris · April 6, 2000

Q: Why are airline tickets cheaper when you don't fly on a Saturday night? Once I had to fly home on a late Saturday afternoon, and I couldn't believe my eyes when I reached the airport. It was like a ghost town! Skeleton crews at desks, security, and luggage claims. Some shops and restaurants closed. Empty seats on planes. I stretched out across my entire row of seats and slept all the way home.

This makes no sense. In economics class we were taught that, to get more business, a company would offer discounts and other incentives to make people give them business during their slow periods.

So why do airlines want you not to fly them on Saturday nights? Why don't they want seven-day-a-week business instead of only six?

-- Carol Anne Gordon

A: Airlines use Saturdays to divide customers. Passengers who are able to book an itinerary staying over a Saturday night are considered leisure travelers and offered a reasonable airfare. Those who don't are generally considered business travelers. Their fares aren't reasonable.

For example, a roundtrip ticket without a Saturday-night stay from New York to San Francisco will set you back by a whopping $2121 on most of the major carriers. With a weekend stay, it's only $389.

The Saturday night requirement is arbitrary and stupid. It assumes that all vacations are long and that all business travelers are loaded. That's unbelievable, considering the fact that the airlines employ honest-to-goodness PhD's with rocket science degrees to handle pricing software (also called "yield management" in airline-lingo). Can't these pinheads figure out a better way to set prices?

I spoke with a few airline insiders, and they privately expressed their frustration with the status quo. Basing the cost of a ticket on a single day of the week is as foolish as it sounds, but the question is, what do you replace it with? While carriers like American Airlines and, most recently, Northwest, have experimented with other ways of charging passengers (Northwest calls them "flex" fares) inevitably, airlines return to the old Saturday night rule.

Jim Haynes of the Commercial Travelers Association has for years been a lone voice in the wilderness on this issue. He's campaigned to lift the onerous Saturday-night requirements, which he says penalizes frequent travelers - and especially small-business owners and other entrepreneurs, who have to pay for airfares themselves. But the airlines didn't budge.

All of which brings me to the answer to your question. Just because you saw an empty airport doesn't mean you can assume the airline was losing its shirt on that day. The passengers who were flying paid between eight and ten times as much as the "leisure" travelers that flew the rest of the week. And statistically speaking, many airports remain busy on Saturdays now, say the airline execs I chatted with about this column. So your observations probably represent the exception rather than the rule.

The issue you raise, however, is completely valid. Is it fair to charge passengers more because of the nature of their trip? What's a more egalitarian way of setting rates? I'd like your feedback on that. E-mail with your thoughts and I'll include them in a follow-up column.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion. Ask Chris appears weekly on this site.