Why are airlines against the transferring of tickets to other persons?

Another factor--sometimes life happens and you can't fly. In the old days you could simply sell your ticket to someone else, now you either have to eat a hefty change fee or lose it outright. That's money in their pockets that they didn't use to get.

Airlines aren't just in the business of selling "tickets" to seats. They are selling tickets to seats on different days. It's the "different days's" part that means that the same seat will sell for a lower price "in advance" and a higher price closer to the flight date.

If you could re-sell the ticket to a friend, you could (theoretically) get the advantage of the "different days." More to the point, speculators could do the same. The airline doesn't want to allow this opportunity.

The best solution is for the airline to refund your "cheap" ticket, so they can re-sell the same ticket at a higher price on a "different day" to another passenger. Many airlines will do this. Some will not, because they don't value customer service/relations enough.

This may result in an abuse situation. You can think that a non-registered travel group bought so many tickets with different names on a certain flight, then start selling the tickets but for larger price.

Unchangeable tickets will get rid of this situation and only registered travel companies can have legal deals with the airlines.

Another reason might be that airlines tend to overbook planes, if they can. They expect a certain percentage of passengers to cancel their flight and want to prevent empty seats. If everyone found a replacement, there would not be enough seats on the plane for everyone!

I realize there's already an accepted answer about "yield management" but, while their price discrimination strategy certainly exacerbates their rationale, I think that misses the point. I think the bigger reason is quite simply that they can get away with it. Let me expand on that. When most people book an airline ticket it's because they're planning to fly themselves so they discount the chances that they'd want to transfer the ticket to someone else. This means when most people book a flight they're completely willing to agree that the seat they're buying can only be used by them even though objectively that's an unreasonable condition of the sale.

There's frequently this assumption that speculators being involved means gouging, well they will certainly try to gouge people but there's no guarantee they'd be successful. There's certainly a guarantee that buying a group of plane tickets that are refundable will be a profitable strategy since any tickets that can't be sold for a profit will be refunded the original purchase price. However, most tickets are nonrefundable and, as such, this strategy wouldn't work out so well.

Well, if the airlines change their policies, remove restrictions and make the tickets transferable, this would create a whole new market niche for resellers. If this happen there would be many complications related to liability of the resellers, quality guarantees, safety rules and more. It would be virtually impossible for the airlines to operate within the same legal terms, as the do now.

When I read the original questions and then the answer that explains "yield management" or "revenue management" I'd asked myself would I fly on the ticket I bough through an auction website? I would not.

Transfers can be two ways. If they have to register the transfer then of course they should be able to control the flow of cash. HOWEVER, if they don't register it, as for example might the situation if I gave you my bus ticket then, apart from the economic factors, there are clearly a few accountability and safety factors.

1. If the plane crashes for some reason, the airline would not be in a position to state who was on board. So they would then end up reporting that the ticket seller/donor had died, when in fact it was the recipient.

2. If the plane is hijacked, or even brought down by terrorists, it could be that the terrorists were the ones who bought the re-sold ticket. And the airline would think it was the original buyer.

3. Ditto for the situation where someone might have been smuggling drugs or other contraband.

I'm sure you can come up with other safety and security aspects if you think hard enough.