Originally Posted by
flyingfran
Would someone explain to me why the airlines charge a flat sur-charge fee rather than just increasing fares. It seems really unfair to have the same sur-charge applied to a $125 fare between JAX-ATL versus the same sur-charge for a $500 fare between JAX-SEA. That seems so unfair that I cannot understand why a single person in management would even think about that idea for more than 30 seconds.
Because if DL boosts fares and the other majors don't, all of the price-sensitive fliers like the folks posting in this thread are going to ditch DL for the cheapest seat from JAX-SEA (or wherever they're going), because hub flying allows multiple options for getting from A to B. And it's easy to see what airline offers the cheapest seat because of consolidator sites like Sidestep and Kayak.
Originally Posted by
flyingfran
Am I reading the previous post correctly? Does Northwest add $330 in fuel sur-charges to the price of every round-trip ticket?
Nope, I bought a RIC-BOS roundtrip on NW for an even $200 a few weeks ago.