[justme]

surely if you are flying around with a bunch of seats bought but never used would be cheaper for the airlines?

SURELY you understand that a full airplane brings in more revenue than an empty one.

First, if they are a "no show" you can sell them to last minute sales or fill up the seats with standbys, or alternatively you can fly the empty seat, reducing the overall weight (and therefore cost of the flight) and keep the money!!

First, what happens when there is no one that wants to buy a last minute ticket? Oh, that's right... fly with an empty seat and make more money! Or put a NON-PAYING standby passenger in it... that's a money maker for sure! You do realize that on average, an airplane needs to be about 2/3s full in order to be profitable, right? If it was such a money maker to fly empty airplanes, why the hell would we even bother to sell tickets? We could just operate the airline to fly employees, friends, and family around! That would be awesome!!

The truth is the reason you do it, is because of your ridiculous, byzantine charging system, which depends on the monopoly positions of the "fortress hubs". Low costs don't do this, as the economics are not the same. The reason the hub airlines do this is to protect their monopoly positions at the hubs.

The truth is, since this was posted in General Discussion, you feel you're not limited to speaking only of the airline that was mentioned (AA in this case), you feel safe attacking the airlines for something completely unrelated. You seriously want to tell me that airlines policies on not allowing people to take advantage of them and the ticket pricing system has something to do with fortress hubs? You've definitely gone off the deep end by trying to connect those two things.