On one hand, this is entirely absurd.
On the other hand, it shows a lot of business sense. The airline market is incredibly polarized between the extremely price sensitive casual travelers (vacation goers) and the entirely price insensitive business travelers (my current employer).
The airlines have a lot of price-discriminating tricks — refundable vs. non-refundable tickets, fare classes requiring Saturday night stays, etc. But I’m not sure they’ve gone far enough to truly distinguish between the two types of customers (maybe that Asian airline with the first class cabins has).
