Originally Posted by
sharklover
Well it now appears the DEN fares for next year have at least doubled. Good thing I bought 1 for Feb for just over $200. Now the cheapest you can fly for is at least $400 and over many days its $600. I think this is absurd. You can fly from MIA-SFO for $379 on many days and that is very reasonable. Why should MIA-DEN now cost more than MIA-LAX and MIA-SFO? It makes no sense. On many routes AA is forcing you to wait to book tickets closer to departure date as this is when they offer sales for. SO by wiating you have less chance you will need to pay a change fee and you most likely will end up paying a lower fare.
Why don't you try some simple math? AMR's 2007 report puts the costper available seat mile (CASM) at just about $0.12, though the price of jet fuel has probably pushed that to $0.14-15 today. AA sells about 80 of it's available seats (ie has an 80% load factor) so their looking to get $0.17-18 per butt in seat mile. You want to fly a 3,400 mile round trip MIA-DEN-MIA so any price below a $600 + tax round trip is less than the average cost of providing the service (give or take some variation in the CASM with stage length) and on the same basis a MIA-SFO-MIA costs a little over $900 + tax.
The CASM numbers vary a little between carriers, though not by a factor of 2:1 so if you can find the same trip for half the price it means someone, somewhere be it other travellers or unfortunate stockholders, is subsidizing your travel.