This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Concert tickets are resellable. You can buy a concert ticket and then resell it. That's a very long running business model. Why not plane tickets? That's what our listener wants to know.
He wants to buy and resell plane tickets, especially because these days, most airfare is changeable or cancelable with minimal fees in a way that didn't used to be possible. So that is one of the, let's say, positive effects of the pandemic experience is that now many more plane tickets are changeable, cancelable. So can you have a business, in fact, buying early and selling late, especially because airfare has gone up so much? What if he purchased airfare, you know, a month, two months, three months further out, and then resell those plane tickets yourself? You're like, I want to be better than Google Flights or Expedia or whoever.
I want to become my own little, you know, consolidator of this. Well, I love hearing ideas from our community. Let's review what's possible and perhaps impossible about this particular idea. Can you buy and resell plane tickets like concert tickets? The detailed question and my answer coming up after this quick message.
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Hey, Chris, this is Matt, and I've been following the show for a couple of years now. One of the interesting consequences of pandemic travel is that most plane tickets are now refundable or at least changeable without the large fees the airlines used to charge. It makes me wonder, now that there's more flexibility, can people buy and resell plane tickets the same way they do for concert tickets? When I was in college, I had a friend who did well flipping tickets for popular bands. So I was thinking of doing the same thing for plane tickets now that the airfare is so high.
Looking forward to your thoughts about this. Thanks. [Music]
- Hey, Matt. Well, here's the thing. This would be a great business except for one small problem.
Definitely, as you said, it's good that plane tickets are changeable now. There's a lot of demand. Airfare is really high. So it'd be a great business except for that one thing. You can't change the name on a ticket.
So that's kind of a deal breaker there, at least not on most airlines. And by most, I mean basically all of them. And almost never easily. Even if you make a small mistake in the name that you provide on your ticket, you can call them up. They do have a process for changing that, but it's difficult.
So to change it to somebody else's name entirely, almost impossible, at least as far as I know, and I'm pretty familiar with these things plane ticket wise. You also have to provide a name when buying airfare, unlike concert tickets. Now you buy a concert ticket, doesn't necessarily have to be in your name. It can be transferable, but with a plane ticket, you can't just be like, okay, I wanna buy the ticket now and I'll provide the name later. It doesn't quite work like that.
So in other words, the airlines have basically cut this off at the knees, even before the rules about other changes were relaxed. So it's great that more tickets are changeable now and cancelable, but that one about having a name and not changing the name is still very much in effect. So yeah, I mean, bad news there, but at least hopefully you don't waste too much time. I don't think such a thing is possible for now, so let's move on to the next idea. And listeners, if you've got a question, site@soulschool.com/questions, hopefully I can save you some time.
I'll always give it to you straight, so let me know what you're working on. We'll be featuring questions and answers throughout the year, along with updates from listeners as they launch and grow their projects. That's it for today. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
from the Onward Project.
