If you have ever wondered why an airline or a tour operator is asking you to reveal the purpose of your travel, as pleasure or business, here is a Quora user answering it for you.
When a travel operator asks for the purpose of your trip, it is because they like to know how their revenue is segmented, a Quora user Nicholas Stone stated in his answer. It also helps for marketing purposes, especially to know the category that spends most for the airline and launch offers to target them.
According to the user, the airlines originally had just one class of travel costing the same ticket fare for all. An airline journey itself was considered as glamorous, and further classification wasn’t required for the pride. Then soon the airlines had to search for a better way of revenue generation.
That is how the airlines segregated the flyers as two types --- a category of people who go for trips and they look towards saving money, and the other group of mass whose tickets are paid by the employers/companies they work. The second category has no flexibility in terms of dates or travel choices. They want to travel anyway for business purposes, and couldn't care about the cost of the tickets. So it made sense to make pricier, the inflexible business offers for the second category of people.
According to the Quora user, the initial difference was that the business class people sat at the front of the plane. The arrangement evolved over the period, and the current trend of business class travel experience emerged.
The travel segmentation also helps the airlines to decide the ticket pricing in advance. Pleasure travellers generally plan and book tickets in advance, whereas the business travellers arrange the journey in short notice. There is a principle known as “Price discrimination”, and it’s basically where you charge two different prices for the same thing. On an airline, the guy sat next to you on the plane may have paid five times what you did for an identical seat on the same trip. Or five times less, another Quora user Benjamin Telford added.
Several other users have said that they haven’t had to face this question from the airline while booking the ticket.
