Oh, You’d Better Watch Out, You’d Better not Cry – Airports Aren’t for Deals and I’m Telling you Why

Dealnews verses The New York Times

Friday and Saturday should find highways and airports jam packed with holiday travelers. According to the New York Times, those at the airports may be shopping for electronics while they wait. The article suggests that stores, kiosks, even vending machines like Brookstone*, InMotion and Best Buy may be quite busy.

The premise is that some travelers will buy up headphones and chargers to replace broken or forgotten necessities, while others might be looking for a diversion or “treat” for their travels. It’s also reasonable to think that, right before the holidays, travelers may also be looking for some last-minute gifts for anyone they haven’t yet shopped for.

The Times article suggests that most items in these airport or travel stores sell for prices about 10% higher than the regular retail stores. In my opinion, 10% is not a bad premium to pay for the convenience factor, but reality shows that 10% is not even close to the real markups.

One of the largest margin items I have seen at airports is bottled water. Airports will charge between $2 and $5 per bottle. I realize this isn’t an electronic device which is the direction that this article is going; however I wanted to point this out as a blatant rip-off.  Considering that bottled water can be purchased at local grocery stores for under 50 cents a piece, the fact remains that if we, as consumers are paying 400% more for water, how much are we willing to pay for other items of convenience?

The gang over at dealnews pondered the same questions and their staffers gathered data on 32 different items, such as chargers, data cables, headphones, digital cameras, etc. The sampling was taken from five different airports: New York (JFK), Atlanta, Los Angeles (LAX), Philadelphia, and Cincinnati. Those products and prices were then compared to the lowest pricing available online.

Surprise findings

I was not surprised and I am sure readers aren’t surprised to learn that not one item of the 32 was cheaper at the airport. In comparison to the Times article, only six (less than 20%) were within the 10% range the article suggested. Reverse math points out that 80% or the remaining 26 items in this sampling could cost significantly more at airports verses purchasing ahead of time.

As it turns out, those remaining items were, on average, 34% more expensive at the airport than what the group at dealnews found online. For some of the smaller items, that could mean a difference of $10 or $15. For some of the more advanced technology like digital cameras or high-end headphones, you could be overpaying by $50 to as much as $200. And although digital cameras were the most risky to purchase in terms of getting a good price, charging accessories and headphones too occasionally were priced up to 50% more than they would cost online.

Even the iPods compared would have been reasonably priced, if it weren’t the holiday season. Since Black Friday, we’ve seen numerous online deals that featured equivalent prices to the iPods we found at LAX — but most of those online deals have been bundled with gift cards or MP3 credits. Naturally, you won’t find such an advantage in a vending machine at the airport.

The moral of this article is before your holiday adventure; use your Groupon, LivingSocial, or other daily dealing coupon to pick up that Skull Candy headphone, or Sony digital camera with the 10x zoom. Otherwise, you might get stuck paying 34% more than you should for electronics, gadgets, and the like, at your airport terminal.

*Dealnews note about Brookstone branded items: They largely followed the same prices that you would find for those items in a normal Brookstone store. However, because these items are mostly generic, like charging cables and USB hubs, there’s usually no advantage to buying the Brookstone brand. For example, a Brookstone 4-port USB hub sold for $19.95, but we saw a Lenovo one with Ethernet for just $11 this week. We’ve even seen a Targus one for just $1. Therefore, we decided to omit their generic items from our data for this reason.

Source: dealnews