Are fake airline prices just another conspiracy theory?

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A few days ago I wrote about differing availability of tickets between travel websites and airline websites. In my previous post I had assumed that the all the parties were playing fair and that if one website showed a ticket available at a particular price where as another website did not, it was probably because the websites in question were interpreting the underlying pricing and ticket data differently. But what if one or more of these websites were being underhanded?

Suppose that an airline has excessive inventory on a particular flight. One way to clear the inventory would be to drop the price. Another would be to pretend to drop the price to attract attention from travelers, but sell few or no tickets at that price. With the latter technique, a good fraction of the travelers would be put-off but some would convert to buyers - i.e. there will be consumers who once hooked into researching flights with a particular airline, would prefer not to walk away from the research even if they could not get the original low price.

An extreme interpretation of the technique mentioned above would be "fake price injection". I.e. an airline injects a price into its databases with zero ticket available at that price. I am not sure if this legal, but even if it weren't one can imagine a variation where the airline injects a fake price with a handful of tickets available at those prices, and with all the available tickets on 72 hr holds. That's probably enough to get travelers' attention and sell at-least some seats at a higher, but real price.

Too far fetched? Consider this post by another traveler and blogger. The blogger describes a fare for a flight that few people would be interested in. The fare is only available on a specific day and only if you travel from Baltimore to Mobile, Alabama, returning back to Baltimore after a 6 hour stay. Now granted this is not quite as extreme as a completely fake price. But it is in that spirit.

Do airlines systematically indulge in such behavior?

PS: There is one serious constraint on how far an airline can take price faking (assuming that the even indulge in such behavior). That constraint is competition. In most markets there are multiple participants. Without collusion between the players (which is illegal), price faking will not work for long.

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