Airline ticket prices go up and down all the time, so what is the big deal if the airfare goes up a little bit? Let’s see what’s happening!
Higher Domestic Airfares Are Here – You Are Not Alone!
Here’s the thing with ticket prices – they typically go up the closer the time comes to departure or for higher travel seasons. The tickets will “normally” be the lowest at least 3 weeks from departure (sometimes even farther in advance than that). There are often sales that are instigated by other airline prices or certain routes that get discounted.
Recently, the Chicago Business Journal (paywall) found that both American Airlines and Southwest have raised their prices for airfare by $5 each leg. That means that you are looking at an extra $10 for a roundtrip over what you would have paid just a couple/few weeks ago. Shortly after AA and Southwest raised those prices, the other US main airlines mirrored that price move so you will likely see it with all domestic tickets on non-budget carriers.
First Noticed
I actually found out about this first when I was searching for a ticket on Southwest. I noticed the ticket price was higher than it had been before and I probably wouldn’t have even spotted that except I had the exact points for the award in my account the week before and then, those points weren’t enough. This was about 2 weeks ago.
Southwest Raises the Price Across the Board
This is thanks to Southwest raising their prices $5 per leg across the board. This means that even the historically cheap routes of LAS-LGB are now facing a regular, baseline price of $40 each.
This increase may be why we haven’t seen the weekly Southwest sale in the last two weeks, maybe? Of course, at least we still get 2 free bags with Southwest while we get nothing extra from the other airlines.
While this isn’t a huge increase, it does mean that the baseline price for airfare going forward is going to have an extra $5 built-in. For a family of four buying a roundtrip, non-stop trip, that adds up to an extra $40.
Have you found any particular routes seeing higher prices lately?
Just $10? I flew a United route mid July last year, purchased mid-May for $400. This year the same route in mid July priced in mid May is $900. Decided to go somewhere else, and used a different airline.
That hurts! As far as the $10, that is just baseline increase so there can be other increases as well, depending on routes and season (and also any loss in competition).