Why are flights getting more expensive as traveling returns back to normal?
As traveling is becoming more safe countries become to open their borders again coming out of lockdown.
As a result of this, I started planning my next trip abroad but noticed that the flights are much more expensive than before.
Doing a simple London (any) to Moscow (any) search and playing with the dates to find the cheapest option, results in this flight:
Before, I would've expected to pay <£200 for that at school holiday time. That is not school holiday time, different airports, and different airlines. That flight leaves from London Luton when the <£200 was from London Heathrow which is even more expensive.
Why have flight prices rose so much? I would have expected it to be cheaper because people are hesitating to book flights.
Best Answer
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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