These days, airlines are finding that they can no longer sell tickets at a higher price. While in previous years they increased prices by tens of percent, last year they hit the ceiling. This follows from the analysis of the company Cirium, which they drew attention to Financial Times. And the trend is turning. Airlines are under pressure and have to keep prices to a minimum, also because there are more aircraft on the market and competition is getting tougher. Among other things, because leasing companies are withdrawing aircraft from China. If there was a geopolitical conflict, they don’t want to “drown” them there like in Russia before its invasion of Ukraine. They thus relocate aircraft to safer markets.
Cirium’s analysis examined the prices of one-way tickets in the lowest economy class on more than six hundred popular routes. It did not include fees or taxes in the calculation. And she found that prices were only growing by two percent year-on-year. The data refer to last September, the last period for which it was available. At the same time, even last year in February, plane tickets rose by 27 percent.
For example, a one-way ticket in the lowest economy class on a transatlantic flight from London Heathrow to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York cost an average of $343 (just under 7,700 crowns) in September, i.e. nineteen percent more than in 2019, the last year in which development was not affected by the covid-19 pandemic.
Prices also rose in the Czech Republic. “Typically, tickets to Asian destinations increased by an average of ten percent last year,” says Josef Trejbal, director of the Letuska.cz portal.
The market situation was difficult for airlines, they could afford to raise prices also because there were not enough planes on the market for a long time. The rate of price increase apparently surprised even the authorities of the European Union, which, according to the Financial Times, is investigating what caused such a rapid price increase. The Italian government, for example, has previously threatened to introduce price caps on selected routes.
They haven’t been caught yet, and despite the price increase, carriers have benefited from the effect of deferred demand – after the “end” of the pandemic, a significant number of passengers who were either starving after a holiday by the sea, or simply resumed business flights, returned. Thanks to this, the airlines expect record sales for last year, according to estimates they should reach 896 billion dollars (over twenty trillion crowns).
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2024-01-02 17:00:00
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