So we end up with a situation whereby to fill a British Airways plane from London you charge all the people boarding at London a high fare and then fill the obvious gap (Because you are right, there are not THAT many people who will pay 700 quid for an economy flight to the US) with half price tickets from elsewhere in the EU. I get the business sense behind it but you also have to understand why it irritates people enough to get them faffing about positioning and dropping sectors.

I wonder how many seats you'd sell at £500 ex-LHR...

Looking at Dublin you have to wonder how many of this 'competition' is artificial. The direct flights from Dublin to the US are not exactly deal of the decade - the via LHR routes undercut them by often hundreds of euros. I see no indirect flights via AMS, CDG or DUB undercutting direct flights *from* LHR by that amount...

Lets pick another random date - 5th May to 12th May, Dublin to San Francisco.

Direct with Aer Lingus - remember, this is the supposed direct competition these ex-EU deals 'compete' with - is £727.

Yet one-stop in LHR is just £354, less than HALF the price of the direct service.

For comparison sake, the same flight from London is almost twice as much at £690.


I get that people need an incentive to go indirect but wow, thats quite the incentive. To be fair VS are offering the same deal, but one of these will be matching the other because it's commercial suicide not to. So why are these flights so cheap? They seem unnecessarily cheap. Dublin isn't the land of hilariously cheap direct flights with which nobody can compete...

Somebody was first-mover on £354 via LHR. Why when the direct alternative is hundreds more?