A special promotion by Seattle-based Alaska Air has at least one guy up in arms. The promotion currently offers a 10% discount for Holiday travel on the airline's relatively new route (since 2002) to New York from its traditional West Coast base.

[hattip for this story: GaySeattle.blogspot.com which blogged about it two days ago.]

The problem, at least for one Idaho man, is that the promotion was targeted at a specific group -- gay men and lesbians.  Bryan Fischer, who claims to speak for a group called Idaho Values Alliance.

In a posting in which he quotes himself extensively on the right-wing site, CultureDefense.org, Fischer calls the micro-targeted discount a "10% Surcharge On Heterosexuals."

Quietly and with no fanfare, Alaska and Horizon Airlines have begun offering travel specials that are only available to gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered individuals.

Alaska and Horizon employees received an internal email on September 13 that announced the “very soft launch” of a new Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender (LBGT) “micro-website” that is devoted to people who practice non-normative sexual behaviors, and offers them special deals unavailable to those who are sexually normal.

When an employee complained that this was “reverse discrimination,” since there is no “micro-website” for heterosexuals (or for Blacks or Hispanics for that matter), the employee was informed essentially that moral values don’t matter to corporate officials because the LGBT community represents a “gigantic profitable segment of the market.”

(Ads for the promotion linked to the LGBT micro-site and served by Google's 'AdSense' program have sometimes appeared on this site and other gay-themed sites over the past month.)

A spokeswoman for the airline, Amanda Bielawski, tried to explain the deal to a reporter for the right-wing commentary site, World Net Daily (WND):

Bielawski confirmed the outreach to the homosexual community is just "one of the targeted marketing campaigns we conduct every year." She said other specials are offered to military families, seniors and others, and she confirmed those generally are offered through e-mails to people who have contacted the airline for one purpose or another in the past.

For anyone to gain access to the discounts offered to homosexuals, they "would have to be aware of that microsite," she told WND. "Any of the offers that we make as part of our targeted marketing campaigns are open to all customers. Many of them are marketed to specific groups of people."

Asked how travelers would know about such discounts, and unconnected websites, she said the WND article would be doing a pretty good job.

But she also noted other airlines are doing similar promotions.

"There are several of them out there. We are certainly not the first to offer this service," she said. "The ['gay'] site is designed to reach out to a group of customers who are frequent travelers."

The economics of airline fares is certainly bizarre, by any measure, but a discount to one group of travelers -- whether it is to those who use the carrier's branded credit card, frequent fliers, or to those who visit a site branded for a particular group -- is hardly a surcharge on others who didn't get the discount for their tickets.

In a feature entitled, "Air Fares aren't Fair", the website Travel Insider explains fare discounts from the air carrier's point of view:

[I]f the airline can sell an otherwise unsold seat for even $20, it has made as much as $15 extra profit, even though it needs to average $100 per ticket for the first 100 seats it sells on the plane.  The temptation to discount seats that would otherwise not be sold at all is the reason why you'll see a limited number of very cheap fares.

Alaska no doubt assumes that it will gain new passengers for the routes on which the special LGBT rates are offered. Far from being penalized by the discounts, Fischer and others who travel on the same route would -- theoretically, at least -- benefit in the long run from the airline's improved profitability on the route.

But Fischer's objections have, apparently, scared Alaska Air into changing the graphics on it's LGBT-targeted micro-site. The page's web title is still "../gaytravel/LGBT-NYC-Sale.asp", but instead of the prior graphic that identified the page as a "Gay travel" special, the page now simply says that it offers "New York City on Sale."