Why are flights getting more expensive as traveling returns back to normal?

score:6

Accepted answer

The flight companies charge as much as they think their customers are willing to pay.
Right now, after the borders are open again, many businesspeople need to travel asap, and often theres a lot of money on stake. Because of this, they're paying a lot to get to customers/partners/etc...
In these times, touristic travelers (who check prices more) are the minor part of the market, losing some of them will certainly worth it for the flight companies if they have others who are willing to pay those prices.

Upvote:3

One issue is that an airline can only fly a whole plane, even if most of the seats are empty. Before COVID, most airlines would cope with this by doing price discrimination based on purchase timing, round trip schedule, stopovers, etc. Hypothetically a flight might have 20% of its seats sold at high fares, 40% sold at medium fares, and 40% sold at low fares. In other words, many low fares were possible because the plane was already half-full of higher paying customers.

As of June 2020, many flights aren't even half-full at all, let alone half-full of higher paying customers. This is a financial disaster for airlines because it ruins the model described above. The medium-term outcome is unpredictable. The short-term outcome seems to be that airlines are cancelling many flights and focusing on selling higher fare tickets that might cover the costs of flights they do fly.

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