Sheikh Yerbooty

Seems like the US airlines may finally have cottoned on to the fact, that a collective race to the bottom (fare wise) will only result in everybody entering Chapter 11.

You guys have bean conditioned to unrealistically low fares, and while this may seem like a very cold bucket of water to have thrown in your face, in reality it's a reflection of the airlines not wanting to live a life of eternal financial deficit.

In the long run this will be good for the aviation industry, even if it will sting a bit in the beginning. But having an industry that is actually financially viable is a bit more important than Mr. and Mrs. Kettle being able to secure transcontinental passage at a price which doesn't cover the cost.

CMK10

I haven't found too much out of line. I put together a two city baseball trip for early May, a roundtrip to Atlanta mid-week in late May then a weekend in Miami in June and ex-RDU all fares were in line with what I was expecting. The worst was $238 r/t DL RDU-ATL-RDU and it could have been lower if I didn't need specific flight times.

footastic

Ive seen maybe a 20% jump this year over last... Mostly do SMF/SFO - BOS/NYC transcons with the occasional IAH/AUS hop.

brendog

I haven't noticed much of a difference at all, but I also rarely buy tickets more than a few days in advance. On my standard routes, I've been seeing roughly $800-$1,000 for WAS-LAX, $500-$700 for WAS-MEX, and $400-$600 for DCA-ORD. Pretty reasonable fares, as far as I'm concerned.

My only moderately ridiculous fare this year was DCA-DFW-CRP on 36 hours notice for $1,400. On my current trip, I got DCA-DFW-IND, CMH-ATL-DCA for $500 in F, which is damn reasonable.

javabytes

Honestly, I wouldn't expect $98 RTs MCI-CHI to stay around. Those were nice while they lasted, but wholly unreasonable (on the low end). At 30 miles per gallon and $3.60/gallon for gas, you can't drive it for less than $120 in gas alone. Airlines are trying to get you there in a vehicle that costs several thousand times as much as yours does, all while paying the salaries of people to check your bags, make sure your plane is well maintained, pilot you, and serve you Coke and peanuts along the way... and they get you there in less than half the time. It's remarkable that they can come anywhere close to that price. Even $200 round trip for that is still well within the realm of what I'd consider reasonable.

iahphx

Yeah, honestly I don't think these "walk up" fares have seen huge increases. What the airlines seem to be doing is replacing the junk-fare buying customers with customers in higher fare buckets.

brendog

That would be a bad thing, how?

pinniped

Well, I do too...if it's a trip where I absolutely have to be in Chicago. I went up for a 1-day meeting last year, paid about $240 R/T, no problem.

It's just that it has kind of killed off the cheap weekend getaway that this thread was originally about...the discretionary/leisure trip. I agree with what everyone is saying: airlines don't want this type of travel anymore; they are focused on corporate travel more than anything else. If I held directly held stock in airlines, it's absolutely what I'd expect them to do.

iahphx

Well, it would be an extremely bad thing if you could plan ahead and wanted to book a lower fare.

cbn42

You're asking why higher fare buckets would be a bad thing?

If you own airline stock, it would be a great thing. If your employer pays for your flights, or you are part of the 1%, you probably don't care. But if you are a normal person who books flights, it would be bad for obvious reasons.

xenole

I usually do some status / tier point runs around the US on AA and everything has gone up by 200-300%.

Definitely going to reduce the amount of extra recreational flying I do which means less money going towards cabs, hotels, restaurants etc during the trip time.

brendog

I was always shocked when I could book a transcon for $200 or a TATL for $700, as that can't be sustainable. Thus, now that prices are rebounding a bit to rational levels, I can live with it. Heck, look at the adjusted prices pre-deregulation. We are flying for peanuts compared to the 1970s.

I most definitely don't own airline stock (I can think of better ways to piss away money...), and I'm probably not part of the 1%, as I presume the cutoff for assets is likely in the 8 or 9 digit range in USD. Insofar as my employer paying for flights, that is true, but it comes directly out of my budget and directly affects my bonuses and incentives, so I am careful with my employer's money.

As flights were priced far too cheaply for so long, as evidenced by the financial straits of the legacy US airlines in the past couple of decades, I'm fine with paying market rates. I'd rather pay more to have better service than have the airlines continue cutting everything in a race to the bottom.

pinniped

Well, since deregulation, we've *always* paid "market rates", right? I mean, by definition, the cheap fares and the expensive fares are, together, the market. (Assuming here that we aren't talking about cases of collusion, etc.)

The financial straits of the legacy airlines...who put them there to begin with? Hard to blame that one on the consumers: I blame it more on their own mismanagement. I suppose this could, in some cases, include excessively aggressive growth that led to overcapacity and very cheap fares. But it seems like there are so many bigger issues with the way the airlines have been managed...

The problem with paying a little more to get a little better service is that it's been tried a dozen different ways and usually doesn't succeed on any kind of grand scale. Midwest Airlines of the 1990's in the U.S., perhaps Porter in Canada...nothing on a UA or AA type of scale. We talk about service, but at the end of the day we really just want cheap fares. If Airline A charges $200 R/T and Airline B charges $205 R/T but gives you snacks onboard, we've proven over and over again that we book Airline A en masse. In fact, our corporate travel booking engines are set up so it's often difficult to book Airline B. (Midwest in the 90's was successful when they were the only one flying the nonstop. A nonstop flight usually gets preferential treatment by corp booking engines, as it should.)

flitcraft

Just to clarify--according to an analysis published in the Washington Post, the 1% cutoff is actually at $516,663 for household income--nowhere near 8 or 9 digits. If you're at the 60% percentile--comfortably in the top half of US household incomes, you're earning $59,154 a year. At the 40% percentile, you're at $33,870 per household.

With current airfares, that means that a person at the 60% percentile will be paying about 1% of their gross household pre-tax income for a coast-to-coast flight. Add a family member or more and you multiply the percentage of the total yearly income spent on that one flight. And that's for someone in the top half of the income strata.

For those of you in the 1%--now that you know who you are--or even in the top 5 or 10%, ask yourself if you would be comfortable spending 1% of your annual pre-tax income on a coast-to-coast flight and how often you'd be able to do it. That's the question well more than half of all Americans will be asking themselves. (And, in reality, the budget hit is harsher for those in the lower income ranges because the marginal value of a dollar is lower to the wealthy than to those that aren't.)

It's true that pre-deregulation, flying was a luxury reserved for the rich. Now in the near monopoly conditions that mergers have given us, it will rapidly become so again.

Oh, and good luck with the airlines deciding to spend all their new revenue on better service. I won't be holding my breath on that one.

AA_EXP09

There is no petrol duty on international flights (though I am unsure of its taxation domestically.)
The same cannot be said for petrol pumped into a vehicle (and there are state/local taxes on it that do not apply to jet fuel.)