Virgin America Elevate - Virgin flights much more expensive than last year

Last year at this time (winter months Jan/Feb/March), the weekly emails from Virgin offered fares as low as $29, sometimes $39/$49 for their short-haul routes (SFO-LAX/SAN/LAS). This year, I keep getting the weekly emails and surprised to see the fares are routinely $69 or $64 each way. This is nearly twice the price as last year. Does anybody have a sense if the flights are mostly full these days? This is a pretty slow time of year to be asking $160 for a round trip from SFO-LAX, especially when SFO-JFK isn't too much more.

Wondering if anybody has any insight?

Last year was "money losing dumping cheap seats on the market" pricing. $69 is a decent price to fly anywhere, even though we all want to fly for near free. For the price of a tank and a quarter of gasoline, you can fly around the west one way. My flight to SEA a couple days ago was jam packed, as were the rest of the day's flights, as was my return yesterday on another airline.

Also,

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/milesbuzz/1187842-jet-fuel-up-58-since-summer.html

Interesting to know the flights are full. Haven't been on Virgin America in a while but last summer I took a JFK-SFO flight and it was pathetically empty. Was wondering if it's still the same and they just changed their pricing strategy to make more revenue from existing customers instead of trying to generate new revenue from new customers. But sounds like planes are full and at much higher fares.

You can always click on the seating diagram for a flight to see what seats are currently taken.

I find most JFK transcons to be quite full, well from LAX anyway. I have done a SFO-BOS in the last 6 months which only had 30 onboard. But all carriers experience these ups and downs, Tue/Wed are pretty quite days around the domestic network.

They were clearly buying load factor this time last year, but I guess they are a little more cautious this time around.

DFW going out for $99 not too bad when combined with a promo code.