Sir Richard Branson

[AndrewJB]

Several US-owned companies (United Fruit Company, Del Monte etc) used to grow bananas and pineapples on vast plantations in central America and the Caribbean islands that they "owned". They used their huge wealth to buy governments (hence the phrase "banana republic"). When the Brazilian government decided it had had enough in the mid-20th C and moved to nationalise the massive plantations in the country, the US-owned companies kicked-up a fuss, demanding compensation. The government responded by offering to repay all the money that the same, huge companies had officially paid out during their highly profitable operations in the country as compensation. Turned out that those same companies had not paid out anything officially - either to buy the land or in tax.....

That happened in Guatemala in the ‘50s. The Guatemalan government took the companies declared values as the benchmark for compensation - the very low ones they’d given to avoid tax. The US brought about a coup.

[Paul Waine]

I spend a lot of time flying to the US and flying in the US. For carriers of the same level it's not common to find variations of more than $100 or so on the same route. It may just be that they all work to the same pricing model and have the same costs but there isn't much difference out there.

I used to do the same, aggi. Sometimes you could find "bargains" - business/club class for less than premium economy, for example - other times not. As all the airline prices are published online and are "in the public domain" it wouldn't be too difficult to follow each others prices, undercutting where you believe it will gain some business and pricing higher when you know that demand is exceeding supply. Code sharing/route sharing I'd expect also contributes to pricing alignments.

[Taffy on the wing]

Wow 2 quotes in a day, I feel I am now on the idiots list of targets

You are certainly on the list......top idiot!

[aggi]

I used to do the same, aggi. Sometimes you could find "bargains" - business/club class for less than premium economy, for example - other times not. As all the airline prices are published online and are "in the public domain" it wouldn't be too difficult to follow each others prices, undercutting where you believe it will gain some business and pricing higher when you know that demand is exceeding supply. Code sharing/route sharing I'd expect also contributes to pricing alignments.

That's kind of the point. You used to be able to do that kind of thing but in the past 10 years or so the variation between carriers has been minmal. They've differentiated on service, not price.