An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile.How did you book your flights for your summer vacation? If you're like most people, you bought them online — either straight from the airline's website or through a service such as Expedia, Kayak, or Google Flights. Comparing airline prices, fees, and schedules on your own has become standard procedure.
For instance, when consumers lack full insight into pricing options, businesses may focus less on pricing competition and more on other factors, like product quality or service speed. But when access to information changes, such as with the emergence of online booking, it can alter these dynamics. And as price, rather than flight duration or quality, became the dominant consumer concern, airlines also shifted their behavior. Instead of scheduling the fastest routes, airlines now prioritize the flight path that is optimal to reduce costs — which usually isn't the shortest flight. They also reduced the speed of flights in order to save on fuel. In fact, the research from Ater and Orlov showed that the average actual flight time for the same routes increased between 2.6 and 8.