"Jeff Hacker" wrote in message
om...

"Colin W Kingsbury" wrote in message
ink.net...

I have connected through Minneapolis on my way across the country many
times
snip
demand a higher price. This is the curse of living in a hub city- you
get
direct flights to everywhere, but you pay a fortune for them.

You have other alternatives (AA through DFW, Frontier or United through
Denver, just to name two. And NW can't command a premium for MSP as a
hub -it isn't significantly preferable to any other hub.

Of course if you're willing to connect you have choices, but if you want to
go direct to or from a hub, in many cases your only choice is the hub's
owner. Thus they are able to command monopoly, i.e. highly-inflated ticket
prices on that route. This explains why A-B-C tickets are almost invariably
*cheaper* than A-B tickets: it's not that they're giving the A-B-C tickets
away, it's that they're raping fliers going from A-B. In fact, if you book a
roundtrip flight from A-B-C and get off at B (what is known as "hidden city
ticketing") there's a very good chance the airline will cancel the rest of
your itinerary for violating the conditions of carriage, especially if you
do it more than once.

In fact, the monopoly power (or lack thereof) that certain carriers have
over hubs is probably the main reason they are still surviving. It's
probably the only place in their operations that consistently makes money.

-cwk.