Originally Posted by
jc94
From YYZ or YYT? From YYZ I threw in random dates and got closer to $800. Plus $800 in Basic is another $120 to fly a bag there and back, so $920. Or Standard which is about $850. Which doesn't seem that reasonable actually. I can do that in May/June for the same money.
And of course AC Y is now so miserable for anyone over 5' there are preferred seats at $200-$300 RT without status, or hours of misery and those effects linger especially with jetleg.
AC 'base' prices just don't work. It's not like their extra surcharges or PY/J prices decrease in the winter either. On the same dates above (which was mid-week and included a Saturday) PY was over $2k (about the same as booking it over Christmas actually which is far busier). But I still don't see that many empty AC planes. And if I want to spent $2k on a TATL there are better options than AC PY.
YUL / ORD were the examples that I checked. And, at least in the case of ORD, wasn't a basic fare.
AC, like any airline, is still going to price each market individually. Not all markets will have the lowest possible price.
But even at $850, that seems fairly reasonable to me. I used to fly from Ontario to Europe 20 years ago for around that price (in 1990s dollars).
Each seat sold has to cover it's share of both fixed and variable costs. You can't sell too many seats at $200 each direction before government taxes/non-airline fees before the calculus makes that flight uneconomical to operate.