Three of the largest U.S. carriers—Delta Air Lines, American Airlines, and United Airlines—were charging more for some domestic tickets booked for one passenger than for the same domestic tickets booked for two or more passengers as recently as last week, a flight-deal website discovered.
As first pointed out by the points and miles website Thrifty Traveler on May 29, searching for the same flight on certain airlines would yield vastly different results depending on how many people were flying. Kyle Potter, the site’s executive editor, first noticed the discrepancy on a Delta flight he was pricing out.
“It became clear after double-checking and rerunning the search several times that Delta was charging me more because I was searching for just one passenger rather than two,” Potter told the Washington Post.
Here’s one example, as pointed out by Thrifty Traveler and confirmed by Afar on Friday: An 8:55 a.m. American Airlines flight on October 16, 2025, from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Fort Myers, Florida, shows a $422 charge for a one-way ticket for a single seat in the main cabin economy. But for two, the price drops to $273 per person—a difference of nearly $150. Interestingly, booking for two also allows access to a basic economy fare, which is even cheaper, at $263 a person, and did not appear in a search for one ticket.
Other flight fare tracking services, such as Dollar Flight Club, have also noticed and reported on this price discrepancy since the initial story broke last week.
“We observed situations where searching for a solo ticket yielded fares $50 to $100 [or more] higher than if two or more passengers were booked together,” Jesse Neugarten, CEO and founder of Dollar Flight Club, told Afar, calling the solo traveler fee “absolutely real.”
Thus, it appears that for flights with major U.S. carriers, bookings with two or more people automatically put passengers into a different fare bucket, making them eligible for lower fares.
These types of fares are sometimes referred to by the industry as “accompanied fares.” For instance, on the example American flight from above, American’s fare rules stated it was an accompanied fare and that passengers “must be accompanied on all sectors in [the] same compartment by at least one adult” for the discount to take effect. You can see the rules by clicking on the “fare rules” when viewing a particular flight.
Accompanied fares seemed to appear only on certain flights for select routes. In other words, it wasn’t a widespread practice. It also mostly seemed to show up only on one-way domestic flights. Apart from that, it’s tough to find any clear pattern to the flights that have accompanied fares. None of the sources covering this story, like Thrifty Traveler, found the same type of fares on airlines other than Delta, United, or American; accompanied fares were not found on flights booked through JetBlue Airways, Alaska Airlines, or Southwest Airlines.
No matter how you look at it—as a tax on solo travelers or a discount for group travelers—the difference in fares for the same flight is surprising and has garnered a lot of attention online, including from blogs in the aviation space, like View from the Wing, which called it a “solo traveler surchage,” and popular Reddit threads with chiefly negative sentiment on subreddits such as r/travelhacks and r/solotravel.
Has this been in effect for years without the flight-buying public realizing it? It’s tough to know for sure.
“Given how opaque airline pricing can be, it’s tough to say exactly when this began, but the signs suggest it’s been around longer than most travelers realize,” Neugarten said.
Airlines seem to be targeting business travelers mostly, Neugarten says, with solo leisure travelers caught in the cross fire. He noted that those who travel for business are more likely to be alone and less likely to be price sensitive and often book last-minute, when prices have risen.
Since the hubbub last week, Delta and United appear to have pulled back their accompanied fares, according to reports from both Thrifty Traveler and Dollar Flight Club, but American appears to still be publishing them as of writing. None of the three airlines responded to Afar’s request for comment.
While it’s not clear what airlines will do next, Neugarten says customers should be aware and double-check all search tools, such as Google Flights and ITA Matrix, to make sure they’re getting the best deal.
“With scrutiny mounting and solo travelers getting upset, airlines may pause or reframe how they implement this,” he said. “That said, as revenue management strategies grow increasingly sophisticated, segmentation tactics like these are likely to evolve rather than disappear.”
