It’s no secret that large airline companies dominate travel in the United States. Delta, US Airways, United and Southwest come to mind. In 2013 American Airlines merged with US Airways to decrease the number of airlines on the Eastern Seaboard even more. With the small number of choices and our dependence on only airplanes and cars, airlines can practically monopolize the industry and charge unnecessarily high prices.
There are only a small number of airlines available to the average traveler in the U.S. If you start planning a trip, you will notice there are a large number of available times to fly, but only one airline offering those times. Unfortunately this lowers competition and increases prices. The market usually causes prices to find their balance because some companies will compete on cost and drive prices down, which then forces other companies to do the same in order to remain in the market. It’s basic economics, but for the average flight from Charlotte to Chicago, New York or Washington, D.C., there is hardly any competition.
Flying doesn’t have to be expensive either. The real cost of a flight is much lower than the U.S. airline companies want you to believe. To test this easily and without diving into companies’ descriptive details, you can just look at a profitable airline operating at incredibly low costs.
Ryanair is the best thing since sliced bread. The company slashes prices and destroys any conventional price expectations. At this very moment, it’s possible to book a flight from London to Bordeaux, France, for $28.94, from London to Barcelona for $32.15 and from London to Rome for $32.15. These are all one-way ticket prices which would make the price of a round trip ticket hover around $57-$76. That’s less than a tank of gas in the U.S.
This sounds too good to be true, but believe it. Ryanair carries more international passengers than any other airlines, it operates to 180 destinations throughout Europe and North Africa, and it operates more than 1,600 flights a day. In the past 12 months, 93 percent of flights have departed on time, with fewer canceled flights than any other airline.
By comparison, a flight of similar distance between two large cities in the U.S. will hardly ever get below $250. More than 900 miles separate London from Barcelona, while only 725 miles separate Chicago from Charlotte. Yet, a flight from Charlotte to Chicago will cost upward of $300. There are numerous variables that you can claim will affect the ticket price, but a difference that big is no fluke.
On Ryanair, passengers still get two carry-on bags, still have the same size seat and still get to their destination unharmed. But obviously there has to be differences in order to be able to offer such low prices.
Ryanair flies into smaller airports that surround large cities. In the previous example, you wouldn’t be leaving from London Heathrow, but from London Stansted. Ryanair doesn’t offer first class, and it only has one type of plane in its fleet, which reduces turnaround time because every plane is the same. Lastly, Ryanair doesn’t have an airport staff. Passengers are required to print out their own boarding pass or have it on the Ryanair mobile app. They can still check bags at the airport, but Ryanair uses the airports’ staff.
All this has made me wonder why American airlines charge so much money. If any airline has the ability to offer these kinds of prices and remain profitable, then it has to be possible.
