I just assumed they already were doing this. Did they really used to charge the same price for flights on every day of the year? That would be silly, no? It doesn’t make sense to me for people to be angry about differential pricing.
Comments on the linked blog suggest that the problem is a lack of information in the communication of ticket prices. Consumers (such as myself) don’t really have any idea what a ticket will cost–we either have to just buy something blind or else do informal statistical inference by running a lot of queries on Expedia or whatever. As a result of this ignorance, airlines have an incentive to advertise super-low fares, which then leads to surcharges etc. What a mess.
On the other hand, I never feel comfortable complaining about airport/airline experiences. I fly a lot and as a result am a big polluter. So, really, anything that makes flying more of a pain in the ass is probably a net benefit to the world.
Given that airlines do price discrimination more extensively and obviously than just about any other industry — different pricing for weekday business travelers, for example — it's hard to understand why anyone would be surprised at this.
I reluctantly agree with your last point, Andrew! We should really push toward more webbased videoconferences or at least conferences with web diffusion… It is basic to organise and would benefit the community for free.
There's also Farecast, which tries to predict whether the ticket price will go up or down (whether you should buy the ticket now or later). Farecast is a part of Bing travel.
From what I've read, the only difference would be the explicit surcharge; ordinarily there would 'merely' be variation in ticket price. Airline load management is apparently a sophisticated and important branch of operations research.