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I had planned for my wife, daughters and I to take a holiday from our home in China to the UK for a few weeks in July. Usually, when people visit us in China from the UK, the cost is around £450 to £500 for a return flight. Looking online, I can see that such tickets are available. However, when I looked at the flights from China to the UK the costs for return tickets were in the £850 to £1,000 range.

This seems unfair. Buying the same ticket on the same airplane results in vastly different prices depending on your origin. What justification is there for airlines to charge double the price for return flights from China to the UK and back as for the return flights from UK to China and back?

As it stands this will end our vacation plans as the cost has gone from an expensive £2000 trip for the family to an astronomical £4000 trip, equal to my entire years salary.

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Are you sure that these are the exact same tickets? Did you look at the prices on the same day? Are you looking at tickets for the same dates? – Karlson Mar 28 '12 at 15:37
can you get someone in the UK to book for you? – rs79 Mar 29 '12 at 14:17
It seems to me that AAA-BBB-AAA is not the same product as BBB-AAA-BBB because, by definition, the flight dates, times, and directions cannot be identical. In the former you fly from AAA to BBB first then BBB to AAA, in the latter, vice versa. The time and dates of flights can dramatically affect their demand. Accordingly, their prices vary. Perhaps there is also a country-of-origin bias to the price of return tickets, but determining that bias apart from the effect of dates requires analysis of a sampling of return ticket prices, not just comparing two complementary return airfares. – alx9r Jan 8 at 21:44

3 Answers

up vote 15 down vote accepted

The most simple answer to this is "because they can"!

In most markets International airfares are priced on a directional basis, so AAA-BBB-AAA will be priced completely differently to BBB-AAA-BBB, and it's extremely common for the prices to vary wildly between the two origins.

Sometimes the price different at a point in time is simply due to a "sale" going on at the time, however for most routes it's not uncommon for one origin to almost always be more expensive than the other direction.

For the most part this is simply a matter of the airline selling flights for as high a price as they believe the market can support. Obviously their end goal is to fill as many seats as possible at the highest price possible, and the best way to do that depends significantly on the market. eg, perhaps BBB-AAA-BBB is mostly business travel, and thus they can charge more for the tickets than for AAA-BBB-AAA which is mainly personal leisure travel.

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I think that "because the can" shouldn't be the right answer. Selling the same product at different prices based only on the purchasers origin is frankly just racist. – Rincewind42 Mar 29 '12 at 12:45
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I think this answer explains how the two are not actually the same product (last paragraph). They can be different products targeted at different markets. – ibz Apr 23 '12 at 17:36
up vote 2 down vote

You may simply be unlucky here.

Airlines sell tickets according to booking classes within broad categories of economy / business / first class. What may simply be the case here is that for A-B-A flights (UK to China return), tickets are still available in a cheaper booking class, while on the same dates for B-A-B the cheaper booking classes are all sold out. The price jump can sometimes be as significant as you mention. Just to give an example, I was searching for London to Hong Kong air fares with Air China; on the Monday of the week I checked prices, it was 470 GBP return but by Thursday all the cheaper classes had sold out and the price for the same day flights would cost be 850 GBP. (I obviously didn't take it, I found a better deal with another airline.)

My suggestion would be that you do a 'broad' search for flights to see what's the optimum time window to book your flight tickets for.

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This is not the case here. The flights are consistently differently priced on all dates irrespective of how far in advance you try. – Rincewind42 Mar 29 '12 at 12:43
@Rincewind42 I find that odd. On both Kayak and Skyscanner, I find flights that are 500-600 GBP for all months. Just to give an example, I found Aeroflot flights (indirect) for 500 GBP on dates 17 May 2012 to 26 May 2012. I genuinely suggest you to read the 'broad' search flights question, then use the 'fare trends' displayed by sites like SkyScanner or Kayak to find out what the optimum dates are. – Ankur Banerjee♦ Mar 29 '12 at 19:07
up vote 2 down vote

I have experienced this before. You can actually check if it doesn't make sense to book the return flight as two single flights (that is what I ended up doing). You can also try to use different airlines for inbound and outbound flights to optimize the cost (I ended up doing it).

The reason is that the airlines are allowed to do it, and so they price the round trips originating from different countries according to local demand and competition. I guess when flying from the UK many potential customers are going for holidays and they consider many other countries in the region - which drives the prices down. Travelers from China might be less flexible.

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