Airline fare wars treat fliers to ‘ridiculously low’ prices
(Source: USA Today)
Air travelers stand to be the beneficiaries of “ridiculously low” airfares as fare wars break out among U.S. airlines desperate to fill seats amid sagging demand. Even those hoping to travel during the peak-period summer months stand to benefit, according to the Los Angeles Times. The paper writes that “fares for summer trips are often among the highest of the year and start rising in the spring, but not this year. With business travel plummeting, airlines are pulling back and offering some of the lowest-priced plane tickets in recent memory.”
Those fare wars got a boost yesterday with the latest salvo fired by Southwest, which announced a new nationwide fare sale that covers travel for almost all of the busy summer travel period. “This is a whopper of an airfare sale,” Tom Parsons, CEO of air travel website Bestfares.com, tells the Times. “They are doing everything they can to make you fly.” The sale caps fares on most days at $99 each way and unusually broad — “a very good deal,” according to fare-tracking site AirFareWatchdog.
The Boston Globe writes “the move nearly immediately rippled through the industry on competing routes.” Indeed, the Times notes “major airlines including American, United and Delta matched the fares on most of the routes flown by Southwest.” As for the latest round of fare sales, the Airline Biz blog at The Dallas Morning News calls the current discounts “pretty meaty.” Airline Biz author Eric Torbenson adds that “one thing is abundantly clear: Demand is dropping a lot more than airlines guessed when they built their schedules last year because despite taking 10% to 15% of their capacity out of the system, bookings are pretty awful.”
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