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9 Worst Airline Rip-Offs and How to Beat Them

9 Worst Airline Rip-Offs and How to Beat Them
(Photo: Thinkstock/Stockbyte)

I recently wrote about the 10 Worst Rip-Offs in Travel, but 10 doesn’t even begin to cover the full panoply of rip-offs across the entire travel space—especially the airline industry. Here’s the basic principle of contemporary airline pricing: Rates are based on how much money the airlines think passengers will pay, not on the actual costs of doing business. Fares for connecting flights, for example, are often cheaper than fares for nonstop flights on the same route, despite the fact that nonstop flights cost airlines less to operate than connecting flights. This makes these gouges particularly painful. Here are my picks for the nine worst rip-offs in the airline industry.

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