Sly Fox wrote:unions tightening their grips, profit margins for airlines are either paper thin or in some cases non-existent.
Airline fares today are the best deal in United States, complementary of the industries employees via bankruptcy, huge pay cuts, loss of pensions and retirement healthcare benefits, employee layoffs, and outsourcing.
Airfares Facts
In round figures, and in inflation adjusted dollars, airfares today are almost three times cheaper than they were in the late 1970s.
There is various data out there offering differing versions of this statistic, depending on the sources of the data they are using and the time period over which they are measuring the change. A July 2010 Wall St Journal article refers to the cost to fly one mile in 1977 as being 8.42c and in 2009, it was 13.5c. The article says that 8.42c in 1977 equates to 'more than 30c' in today's money. That would suggest fares are 2.22 times cheaper.
The WSJ article cites the Air Transport Association as the source of its figures. I can't find the data on their website, but they do have this fascinating page that shows airfare costs in 1978 (rather than 1977) and 2009 (with a different number than that quoted in the WSJ), plus a series of comparisons for other goods and services over the 21 years too. The ATA table shows that domestic air travel costs per mile increased from 8.49c in 1978 up to 12.07c in 2009, an increase of 42%. This contrasts with a weighted CPI that went from 65.2 up to 214.5 over the same period. In other words, the 8.49c in 1978 is the same as 27.93c in today's money, which contrasts with the actual cost of 12.07c - ie, 2.31 times cheaper.
There's one other interesting fact in this table - a table which is crammed full of fascinating facts great for your next trivial pursuit game. Note how the (unindexed for inflation) cost of international travel increased by 52%, compared to the unindexed increase of 42% for domestic travel. When you consider that international travel, although also now vastly less regulated than domestic travel, is still somewhat more regulated, this would seem to gently show, from another dimension, the benefits of greater deregulation.
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence about fares being lower as well, and as in any situation, when one looks only at averages, one overlooks some of the better bargains that are now possible that weren't possible before (due to restrictions on discounting). In other words, the average fare might be 2.3 times less expensive, but a bit of careful shopping around might find you a fare that is now 5 times cheaper than before.
For example, a roundtrip ticket between New York and Los Angeles was $208 in 1958, which translates to $1570 in today's (2010) money. And whereas you'd fly nonstop today, you'd probably have made one or two stops back then.
http://www.thetravelinsider.info/airlin ... ation2.htm
Southwest is slowly moving to the fee based business model .... they never changed it at Airtran after the merger.
Today buy a truly cheap seat and then add "only" the services you want.
If airfare had adjusted with CPI to match groceries, gas, and rent the airlines would be able to provide red carpet service to everyone that boards.
- By ECC29
- By Purple Haize