Mixed bag for spring break travel

by Tom Johansmeyer on

For spring breakers, the news this year is mixed. According to data from Bing Travel and Travelocity, USA Today reports, airfares are up, but hotel rates are down. The result, of course, is a variation on the adage that there’s no free lunch. You may get a deal on one part of your trip, but you’ll inevitably pay elsewhere.

Airfares, on average, are up 9 percent relative to last year, Travelocity found, with the average domestic ticket costing around $351. Hotel prices, on the other hand, are off 3 percent year-over-year, down to $156 a night. According to Bing Travel, the most expensive travel day this spring break season is March 22 – it’s also the costliest travel day between early winter and the end of April. To pick up a deal, go with Tuesday-to-Tuesday or Wednesday-to-Wednesday plans.

Despite the averages, of course, destination does make a difference. Cancun fares are up 23 percent from last year, from $346 to $427. Hotels are cheaper down there, however, falling from $220 a night to $198. The average cost of a trip for two to Cancun for seven nights ticked up slightly from last year, from $2,231 to $2,243.

Think those sale airfares are cheap? Think again!

by Grant Martin on

Nary a day goes by when we don’t receive another email at Gadling from an airline or travel agent trumpeting the latest sale fare to this season’s hot destination. Fares like $215 to Barcelona, $199 to London and $400 to Buenos Aires tickle our travel fancies, filling us with the dream that we can score a dirt cheap international ticket and jetset away for an action packed, budget weekend.

Click through those links to the booking page, however, and your miracle sale fares will evaporate. But where did these original, quoted prices come from? Lets take a look.

In an advertisement (ie, email) that an airline sends to you, airfares are often only quoted one way. So the $215 fare that you see to Barcelona above is actually $430. That’s not a bad price until you also note that taxes and fees aren’t included, which for any transatlantic destination is a least $100. That pushes the price up to $530.

But that’s still a good sale price, right? Maybe not. Yesterday’s Air France sale advertised fares from New York to Madrid for $239. Making the ticket round trip with fees included (say, from March 3rd to March 10th) brings the price up to $570. That same fare on British Airways: $518. Air Europa (who?): $520. What kind of a sale is this?

The lesson here is that it’s important to keep both the advertorial angle and the competition in mind when considering a sale fare. Airlines send these emails out to get your brain engaged, drag you into their site and make a sale, but a good consumer does her homework, compares prices and knows when a fare is truly outstanding.
What works
You can throw nine out of ten of those sale emails into your trash bin as soon as they reach your inbox. Instead, set a fare alert on Kayak or Orbitz for low fares between key target cities (example: New York – London for under $300) and make sure it’s set to alert you every day.

Subscribe to newsletters like Airfarewatchdog and browse the wealth of fares available at Farecompare. They both have twitter feeds that you can follow as well. Keep an eye on Flyertalk for dirt cheap “mileage run” fares if you’ve got some extra time.

And last but not least, keep your head out of the ground when you get a “sale” email from the airlines or a travel agent. If the fare seems too good to be true even though it was mass emailed to fifty thousand people, it probably is.

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A memo to airline passengers

by George Hobica on

If you don’t want to pay what it’s worth, then stop whining about air travel.

I won’t take credit for that pithy remark. It was made by a travel editor friend of mine, the New York Post’s David Landsel, over Thanksgiving dinner.

But it’s been ringing in my ears ever since.

Because let’s face it: we’re not paying enough for commercial air travel. Airlines have cut costs to the bone, slashing pay, eliminating services, deferring new planes, hedging jet fuel purchases, and all the rest. And yet they’re still losing billions.

But while the cost of most everything else we buy, in inflation-adjusted dollars, has gone up (notable exceptions being things like TVs and phone service), the price of air travel has gone down over the last several decades.

Back in the early 1960’s, when a gallon of gas cost 29 cents, a flight from New York to LA could be bought for as little as $250 round-trip. Today, you can fly that route for as little as $178 round-trip when there’s a cutthroat sale going on, but that gallon of gas costs 10 times as much. A brand new Ford Pinto cost $1999 in 1972. And that $250 flight, in 1960 dollars, works out to about $2200 in 2009 greenbacks.
For some odd reason, and I’ve never heard a rational explanation for this, North America’s airlines can’t seem to price their product at what it actually costs them to deliver it.

Experience has shown them that when they raise fares to profitable levels, people simply reduce their flying, and that impacts the entire travel industry-hotels, rental cars, attractions. Because, let’s face it, most air travel is discretionary. Few people have to fly to Hawaii unless it’s to a funeral or to attend college.

And so instead of raising prices, airlines have cut costs, wages, seat pitch, and perks such as meals and pillows. And that’s resulted in cramped and dirty planes, cancelled routes, and grumpy employees and passengers. But what, exactly, do you expect when you pay more for the round-trip taxi ride to the airport than for your flight to Chicago?

Look, I’ve built a career and an award-winning airfare web site on telling people about insanely low airfares. And I love my work. But honestly, when I see a $98 round-trip fare from New York to Denver, I shake my head, and I feel a little guilty. Am I helping the situation by telling folks about how desperate the airlines can get sometimes? It’s like stealing candy from a baby, not that I’ve ever done that. Or at least I don’t think I have.

One way that the airlines are trying to achieve pricing power, frankly, is by reeling consumers in with ridiculously unprofitable fares and then hitting them with all these new fees for checked bags, pets, itinerary changes, and frequent flyer ticket redemptions. But even that hasn’t returned them to profitability. All it’s done is generate thousands of newspaper headlines. Speaking of which, enough about those holiday surcharges already! So the airlines are trying to lose a little less money. Give them a break!

Eventually, and who knows when, the party has to end. Fares need to go up, or we’ll see more airline mergers and Chapter 7 filings. And then fares really will go up. But meanwhile, perhaps it’s time to face reality. Sure, air travel isn’t fun anymore. Sure, it’s a PITA. But just as surely, as crappy as it is sometimes, this is what you and I told the airlines we wanted by voting with our wallets. So maybe we should all just stop whining or get used to paying a fair price for airfare.

George Hobica is the founder of Airfarewatchdog™, the most inclusive source of airfare deals that have been researched and verified by experts. Airfarewatchdog compares fares from all airlines and includes the increasing number of airline-site-only and promo code fares.

Are the economics of Twitter airfares worth it?

by Grant Martin on

More and more budget-travel tipsters are pointing towards Twitter, Facebook and social media outlets as the source for wild cheap airfares these days. And it’s true, in a way. By subscribing to the pundit feeds online it’s possible to get the inside scoop on a few good routes, often saving a few shekels on a future itinerary.

Broad, dirt cheap fares (sometimes called bingos), however, are harder to pin down. You’ve probably heard about the one guy who got a $7 airfare to Iceland or the other woman who flew to Buenos Aires for $40. These (mistake) fares usually occur two or three times a year and more often than not, last less than 24 hours. Yet these are the tickets that fuel the pundit followers.

Now, with the proliferation of active Twitterers, Flyertalk and Slickdeals, bingo fares are becoming harder and harder to find. Rick Seaney (@rickseaney) is a great example. The CEO of Farecompare has access to a broad spectrum of ticket data before it gets sent to travel agents like Orbitz and Expedia and as such, has a virtual crystal-ball into airfares that are going to soon be available. Great position to Tweet from, right? But can’t the airlines follow the same feed? Could they perhaps pay Mr. Seaney to find mistakes before we do? It’s not unlikely.
Now, the more “viral” a fare goes (with mistake fares), the greater the chance that it’ll be canceled quickly. So effectively, this boils the bingo fares down to being in the right place at the right time — in front of your computer, with a credit card when the fare goes live. And booking it. Immediately. Were you busy updating your Facebook profile? Reading Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter Feed? Digging through the endless retweet drivel that isn’t relevant to YOUR ticket? Sorry, you missed it.

In the end, its a question of opportunity cost. How well worth your time is it to sit at your desk, reading pages of Twitter junk to sift out your special fare? The forty hours that cumulatively add up over the course of the year could easily be spent, well, working — the output of which would be the money to buy a regularly priced ticket.

What today’s travel consumer needs is a low frequency, high volume alarm, one website that makes a phone call or sends an SMS only when your perfect fare comes up, the red telephone on your desk, so to speak. This phone may only ring once or twice a year, but when it does, you can pick it up and book your dream ticket. And until then? Spend your time reading Ashton’s feed and not blindly pawing around for bingo fares.

Now, who’s willing to make that call?

Why people aren’t flying. (Hint: It’s not just the fares)

by George Hobica on

Think that all airlines are losing business during the recession? Not quite. Southwest Airlines and JetBlue Airways saw their traffic jump 9 and 10 percent, respectively, in September, while United’s was down 6 percent. Other airlines suffered traffic declines as well. Could it be that consumers are flocking to airlines known for having better service (e.g., JetBlue’s extra legroom, free snacks, and live TV) and lower fees than most of their competition (Southwest has lower fees across the board where they do charge a fee)? Is one reason the airline industry is in such dire shape because the product has deteriorated to the point where people just don’t want to fly at any price?

A recent reader poll by Consumertraveler.com crowned Southwest as respondents’ favorite airline, with 71 percent saying that service was the reason why. The same poll revealed that “comfortable seating” was the main reason consumers who chose JetBlue as their favorite did so.

Airlines are losing money ($11 billion worldwide this year, according to one estimate), fewer people are flying, and, despite capacity cuts, the average fare paid is going down. Now one would think that if you have fewer seats to sell you’d be able to charge more for those remaining. But while scarcity pricing works in most other industries, it appears not to in air travel. The airlines park planes in the desert, but fares stay the same on most routes or go down (depending on which statistics you believe, average ticketed fares have fallen about 20 percent this year compared to last, far more than prices have dived in most other industries). So why is there insufficient demand for air travel?Sure, the recession is part of it. And, let’s face it, most travel is discretionary. Other than attending funerals and weddings, visiting dying relatives, going off to college, or making mission-critical business trips (a technician traveling to repair an ailing nuclear plant), flying somewhere is simply not a life and death affair. Vacationers can stay home, drive, or take the bus. Business folks can seal deals by phone or email, or videoconference, even though doing so is usually less effective.

Airfarewatchdog believes that a lot of people aren’t flying because, to put it bluntly, flying is a big PITA. If air travel were a better experience, we believe, more people would take to the skies, even at higher fares. But, of course, improving the product will cost money that the airlines don’t have and we’d all have to pay higher taxes to fix our antiquated air traffic control system.

To test our theory, we’re running an admittedly unscientific poll asking readers, “If you aren’t flying as much as you used to, what’s the number one reason why?” The options are:

  • “Fares are too high”
  • “I’m afraid of losing my job”
  • “Air travel is a pain what with all the delays and fees”
  • “None of the above”

With over 1500 responses so far, 44 percent have answered that fares are too high, but almost as many (41 percent) aren’t flying because it’s just a big fat bother.

But it’s not just the raw numbers that are interesting. We also asked for comments, and that’s where things get revealing. I think we got one email complaining about high fares (not surprising since fares are trending down), but dozens lamenting the sorry state that air travel finds itself in. People are, to put it mildly, fed up.

Paul Schrodt writes from Columbus, OH, “I used to fly during the winter months to Florida. Now, because of fees and other airline shenanigans I just drive, and enjoy the trip a whole lot more. Let’s let the airlines suffer until they come to their senses again!” Whew.

To be fair, several respondents complained about hassles beyond the airlines’ control. Joseph Kraatz of Oceanside, California, spoke for many when he wrote, “By the time I drive to the airport, find a parking space, get to the terminal, then go through the ridiculous inspections, I have wasted 3 hours. I can drive to Las Vegas in six hours and arrive way before my flight. Is there something wrong with this picture? You bet there is. People should completely stop flying on trips of anything less than 1000 miles.”

But others have stopped flying simply because it’s an uncomfortable experience. “Airlines have crammed more seats into their flying aluminum cans,” one reader laments. Another gripes that seats are “as thin as cardboard” and that he has taken to riding the bus for trips of less than four hours. “The bus seats are much more comfortable and the travel time is comparable. I also get to see a bit of the country side and I’ve yet to have a bus fail to leave the terminal on time.”

But perhaps the reader who summed it up best was the one who simply noted that, “flying just isn’t fun anymore. It’s an ordeal–uncomfortable, crowded, and unhealthy.”

So what’s the answer? Re-regulation? Higher fares? Fewer airlines? Allowing foreign carriers to serve domestic routes (imagine flying Singapore Airlines nonstop from New York to LA)? One thing is clear: airlines can’t go on forever losing billions. Something has to give. And until airlines are profitable again, they probably can’t afford to make flying with them a more pleasant experience. You want friendlier airline staff? Stop cutting their pay and benefits. Comfier padded seats? That will burn more jet fuel, so be prepared to pay for it. And so on.

Even I don’t fly as much as I used to. I travel frequently between my home in New York City and Boston, sometimes more than once a month. And although I created a site called Airfarewatchdog, I usually take the train. The only thing that enticed me to fly recently was a sale on JetBlue combined with a 20 percent promo code discount, bringing the tax-included round-trip fare to $66. But on the train I get more legroom, two-by-two or even single seating, no lines, no hassle, and because I travel the route often, free upgrades to first class, where I’m served a hot meal at my well-padded seat by friendly attendants. It’s almost like flying…used to be.

George Hobica is the founder of Airfarewatchdog™, the most inclusive source of airfare deals that have been researched and verified by experts. Airfarewatchdog compares fares from all airlines and includes the increasing number of airline-site-only and promo code fares.