irishguy28

There are not many passengers who say "I want a flight to any destination that is 10 hours away by plane", and would therefore seriously consider AMS-SFO and AMS-BKK as substitutes; as such, comparing prices is meaningless, because the people interested in buying are not (generally) agnostic to the destination, and would not seriously contemplate SFO as a substitute for BKK, or vice versa. It is not a valid, realistic or accurate comparison to compare fares on these (or any two) vastly different routes. As such, the price of a ticket to SFO does not respond in any way to rises/falls in demand/supply of tickets to BKK, and the price of a ticket to BKK does not respond in any way to rises/falls in demand/supply of tickets to SFO.

The distance flown, or the time/fuel needed to get from AMS to destination A or destination B is not the prime driver of the fare charged by the airline.

It's misleading to think that, if a flight takes roughly the same amount of time, then the fare should be the same. Airlines are no longer required to fix prices like in the good old days, where this type of pricing model may have been more prevalent, but now they can set the fare to a level determined by the market (how many seats have we already sold? How many more do we need to sell? What are our competitors pricing their flights at? etc etc).


So - why is BKK so much more expensive than SFO on the particular day/dates you are looking at? Well, for one thing, there is not an equal number of passengers at AMS, one half wanting to go to SFO, the other half wanting to go to BKK. Also, there are not an equal number of seats departing from AMS to each of SFO and BKK. There is simply is no reason for expecting prices for AMS-SFO and AMS-BKK to start, or evolve, in a similar manner.. They are two entirely different products, appealing to different sets of potential customers, and given their great distance from each other, will experience individual and completely separate/unrelated levels of demand.

It's just not a useful or realistic expectation to have, that all far-flung destinations of a similar distance should (always) be reachable at (roughly) the same price. Passengers tend to have specific destinations in mind, and most will not therefore consider swapping travel plans from, say, BKK to SFO just because it's cheaper to go to SFO. That means you have two entirely different markets; those who want to go to SFO (or West Coast USA) and those who want to go to BKK (or SE Asia); variations in price are not going to drastically alter those markets ("I say, I think we pitched BKK at too high a price! They're all choosing to book SFO instead!") so of course each will end up having its own price that reacts to the supply and demand in that market.

That said, BKK is a notoriously low-yielding route for European airlines, so your price does sound very much on the high side. I suspect there may be an element of the number of flights being still well, well below what it was prior to Covid, and well, well below the actual demand on the route. (Note, for instance, that BA has again postponed its return to BKK until sometime in 2023. Yields must be up with the fewer seats in operation from Europe able to fetch a higher price than previously; demand has returned but supply is limited)