Pricing does change things

These are my musings on the post by Seth Godin on his blog.

I guess change in pricing really changes everything. A friend of mine running a entertainment/gaming lounge has a multitude of games(along with food n drinks) to play but few customers chose to play for longer hours as it was priced on an hourly basis. Interestingly, his earnings were divided almost equally between the games and food because the longer time a customer stayed, the more he ordered. So, he offered a monthly&yearly membership to recurring customers and there were quite a no. of people who signed up.

Coming back to the post by Seth, he suggests a ticket auctioning system by airlines so that people can trade tickets, which to me, seems to be more of an eBay kind of system with all the features of time constraint, minimum consecutive bid, have-to-buy on winning bid etc etc.
But there's more to airline tickets than simply item auctioning. The products that you sell on eBay might not be available after a period of time but they aren't perishable or rendered useless.The seller can again put it up for sale with a renewed price structure. Tickets aren't that way.

It may seem plausible to auction Cricket or Football world cup tickets or Superbowl tickets(for Americans) on eBay, but to have a site just to auction travel tickets is going to be disruptive and destructive.
Imagine spammers buying tickets from LA to NY during Thanksgiving in multiples of 10s and just trying to sell it at double the regular price. You wouldn't have an option of buying one a bit later on at a seemingly affordable price if you are not an early bird. You could say there's a downside of doing so - if the tickets aren't sold, the auctioner will lose.At the price ratio I mentioned, he would break even if half are sold and sell the other at a lower price at the end. But I don't know who would want to fly to meet his family on the other coast and wait till the last day looking at a auction-site to get a cheaper price.

Instead, customers should be able to trade tickets online. Someone who wants to cancel his trip shouldn't end up losing his money when there are a lot others looking for a ticket. He can put his ticket for sale (at the same price he bought or at the current price) and let others buy it. The airlines can charge a nominal transaction fee from the seller and make it up. That way I guess there would be no need to put up unnecessary rules and regulations(that users wont even read completely) and put up an auction site