Originally Posted by
maalloc
Since the end of Covid, there has been a noticeable increase of price when flying eastwards (North America routes have been spared so far).
To SEA, eco light fares have almost doubled. It's common to find Y fares priced as high as competition's J; and J fares priced as high as competition's F. I'm only half surprised you report the same to Australia.
Whatever the rationale behind this change, it's the new price structure for AF and KL in this region.
Luckily for us, there is plenty of competition.
The simplest explanation probably has most of truth in it - it's gotten more expensive to fly to Asia for European airlines, since airspace over Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, and also more recently parts of the Middle East is out of reach. Lot of them have to zig-zag on a few available safe corridor over Saudi Arabia and Egypt or across the Caucasus. At this point, it makes more sense to try and maintain at least positive margin, at cost of capacity offered - hard to compete with some Asian airlines, notably Chinese, but also Indian, which can still make use of Russian airspace to save tons of track miles.