It's not the search's processing cost, it's the lost opportunities to make you pay more for the flight.

This one.

I was pretty frustrated recently when I got a flight for 20% less by clicking through from a Google Flights link than I did from searching directly on aircanada.com while logged in with my Aeroplan account. I know exactly why it's the way it is, but it's pretty discouraging to feel that loyal-customer behaviour like going directly to the airline instead of an aggregator is punished with a higher price.

Hotels pull this schtick too.

Almost always, if you walk up to the front desk and ask for a room, the price is 15-20% more than what you see online at that very moment.

This is baffling, and has to be coming from some convoluted agreement.

The hotel makes a lower amount if I book through priceline or expedia or whatever.

Maybe for larger chains this applies; for small hotels, they always give me the difference compared to Expedia or Booking.

Yeah but you get shitty rooms when you book through expedia.

The hotels hate expedia but they can't opt out of it so they just degrade the product that is offered at expedia's discount rate -- and they degrade it in a way that expedia can't force them to stop (room assignment is always done at checkin).

This right here. Searching costs nothing to run for them, except when the searcher finds a better deal.

Searching actually does cost them money. Most airlines don't even have the ability to sell you a ticket without getting a third-party company involved (the GDS: Amadeus/Sabre/Travelport). The GDS charges the airlines money for every search to send their own data back to them.

I'd argue that's the root of the problem here.

That is not even close to the root of the problem.

Airlines could solve that problem themselves. And will the instant it’s actually worth it to them.

Airlines are being pressured to change the way they do their differential pricing, but the old system wasn’t some gold star land of virtue method either.

Surely that cost is still not the expensive part of the search?

Search processing also costs.

Usually it is done on GDS, which take their cut for each search. And those searches are frequently done on systems can remember 60s when they were created.

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More than one entire company has grown up around flight search:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software

ITA, in particular, is memorable as a HN favorite because their software was pretty much 100% lisp, at least before the google acquisition.

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Can be a few cents for Sabre api calls. This is the gds fee on booking and excess querying, that should be rolled up into doing business but it depends of course, for some airlines every query costs them a fraction of a cent and if every employee agent is doing them alongside customers doing self service, yeah

But at the same time they should’ve just made it more accessible and just raised the prices anyway.