Airfare - strange pricing, what gives?

From what I can gather, your flight from ORD to Athens is $950 because you have 2 stopovers, Minneapolis and Amsterdam. However, when you book from Minneapolis to Athens on the same route, you only have one stopover at Amsterdam, therefore the price goes to S1500. It costs less if you have more stopovers, costs more $$ if you have less or none because of (1) no time lost during layovers and (2) directness of flight.

I don't think this means flights will be going to be cheaper there Minneapolis to Athens.. If I were you I would consider booking the ORD TO Athens flight now, since it sounds like a good deal. Your friends should check to see if flights are cheaper with two stopovers in the middle. It might be, saving them $$$, but being inconvenient.

There's more demand between ORD-Athens than Minneapolis-Athens; they are two different origin-destination pairs (like apples and oranges) and there's no implied correlation in pricing. Prices go up and down based on supply-demand on a particular route (this fluctuates), prices charged by other carriers on that route (this also fluctuates), and a bunch of other variables...computer algorithms crank the numbers constantly so it really doesn't have a single, easy-to-explain rationale. Only a certain tranche of seats will be priced the lowest and that availability varies over time (some folks will never see the lowest price quoted at all).

One (of many probable) rationales is Chicago is a huge airline hub and more competitive to fly out of, probably not only to Athens but other places as well. The same airline may not face as much competition from others flying from Minnesota to Athens, so they can charge whatever the market can bear on that segment. In general, larger airline markets have better prices because more airlines are there to compete for passengers.

Amy, your BIG problem is that you think airline fares should be logical. Who knows anything about airline fares? The airlines don't. Just some computer in a dark room running a program that is trying to max profits. I am almost willing to bet that the $950 price will not be there tomorrow. Good luck.

If you originate in Chicago, there is a lot more competition. If you originate in Minneapolis, you are pretty much stuck with Delta, and Delta knows that.

You should try Turkish Air out of Chicago - they are a great airline and really good prices (even if you have to go through Istanbul first - that's only one layover).

Competition out of Chicago, whereas Minneapolis is a one-dog show. Tom's right, your friends should find a way to get to Chicago (drive, Megabus), and save $1,100. Just think what they could do with that $ in Athens. I know the search engines are always suggesting I leave from Chicago to save money.

Leaving from Chicago frees you to use many different airlines, including Turkish as suggested by Agnes, which is very nice BTW.

Thank you everyone - that actually made a screwy system make sense to me and I won't have to drive myself crazy now!

I think I am going to have a hard sell with my friends telling them to take a mega bus to Chicago for like 6+ hours only to fly back to an airport that is 20 min from their house. :)

We will figure it out though! Thank you!

It's the same as $100 an hour each after taxes if they were to fly out of Chicago.
Not only are your friends spending $1,000 more, but you have an illogical flight if you stick with this initial itinerary. You are backtracking west to eventually fly east, and with two stops.
From Chicago you have a large choice of airlines at lower prices you can fly without backtracking and perhaps fewer stops.

As pointed out, Turkish flies the Chcago-Athens route and is the lowest price and therefore the price setter. If Delta wants to compete with them, they have to match that price, but the only way to do that is to fly you back to Minneapolis where they have many flights a day to Amsterdam and connecting to Athens with KLM.

You might consider using Turkish (change planes in Instanbul) and have you friends fly a discount airline to O'Hare and have a separate ticket on Turkish. I'm actually seeing flights on Turkish for $887 in May, although Delta has them beat with $791 with a single change at JFK.

Spirit flies rt MSP to O'Hare for about $100 plus extras. Leave plenty of extra time because the flights will be on separate tickets, plus extra time to get from O'Hare domestic to Int'l.

Google 'hidden city ticketing' and you'll get many, many explanations of the reasons why airlines price things as they do. (and yes, skipping the first leg of the ticket will result in the cancellation of the whole remaining ticket about 99.5% of the time)

Fun fact- because of Great Circle routing of aircraft that takes you somewhere over Iceland/Greenland, Chicago-Athens is only about 60 miles shorter as an air route than the more northward Minneapolis-Athens routing even those two American cities are 400+ highway miles apart. Site I found puts that as a 9 minute difference in average flight time on an unspecified modern large jet.

The Great Circle mapper:

http://www.gcmap.com/

The can also search out 'open- jaw' pricing: leaving from ORD, but returning to MSP.

I do this frequently, and am doing it again next week. Montreal, like Chicago, has much more airline competition than Ottawa. So I price out my flight leaving from Montreal, but returning to Ottawa. Bizarrely, this often prices out cheaper than a simple return flight from either city (probably because I'm adding a connection on the return leg).

Indeed, there is no real logic.

I'll resurrect this thread three months later to comment on the disparity in fares right now to Italy. Milan is still really reasonable from New York (JFK). I got a round trip ticket back in February (for travel in July) at $545. Now you need to make one stop, but still plenty of fares in the $600-$650 range. Rome, on the other hand is in the $900+ range, but that is a few hundred less than recent Summers.

Maybe this kind of situation exists is other European hubs right now.