An item from The If Trump Really Wants to Fix Something Department:

I am planning to go on a photo outing with old photography friends from Canada in July.  To save money, I have been looking at flights to Toronto from nearby airports, including Charlotte (two hours to the east of me) and Knoxville (two hours to the west).

The best-priced flight I have found leaves Knoxville at 11:05 am and arrives in Toronto at 6:28 pm, with one stop.  The round-trip ticket costs $253 and the trip duration is 7 hours 23 minutes.  Add two hours for the drive to Knoxville and two hours advance-arrival at the airport for international flights, and I would have to leave the house at 7:00 am.

Alternatively, I could depart from Charlotte at 4:25 pm and arrive in Toronto at 6:28 pm on a non-stop flight.  The trip duration is only 2 hours 3 minutes but this round-trip ticket  costs $595.  With the two-hour drive and two-hour advance arrival, I would need to leave the house at aboout 12:30 pm.  I could have both breakfast and lunch at home.

Astute readers may have noticed where I am going with this.  Yes, the Knoxville trip and the Charlotte trip arrive in Toronto at the same time.  The first leg of the Knoxville flight heads to — where else — Charlotte.  There, the plane sits on the tarmac 4 hours 11 minutes as it morphs from a one-stop $253 flight into a non-stop $595 flight to Toronto.

The bottom line is that American Airlines hopes that I will pay another $342 for the sake of saving 5 hours 2o minutes in this bizarre air-flight tango that seems to have nothing to do with the cost or logic of travel but everything to do with good-old supply-and-demand.

I am considering driving the thirteen hours to Canada, not that the airlines care.  They are confident they will get somebody to pay who is willing to pay.  Just like the hokey-pokey, that’s what it’s all about.