3 Weird and disturbing facts about US to Europe airfares in 2014

• New York City: $916
• Toronto: US$932
• Houston: $994
• Chicago: $1,073
• Los Angeles: $1,112
• Atlanta: $1,251

Note: the averages above are only from the tests I performed for the article linked at the top, not universal averages for all flights for all times of year.

Lesson 1: People from Atlanta get screwed by Delta’s near-monopoly

Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport is the world’s busiest, yet since Delta Airlines has a virtual monopoly on international flights (especially to Europe), flyers on average pay more to fly across the Atlantic than any other major city. Both Houston and Los Angeles have much better fares, in spite of all the extra time and fuel it takes to reach Europe.

Lesson 2: You can’t save money by flying to another airport first

Have you ever seen a unusually high airfare and wondered if you could save money by flying to another airport first that has lower fares? According to this data, that would almost never work. It should actually be comforting to know that you’ll do best by just shopping among the flights leaving from your main airport, rather than trying to hack the system using two round-trips to cross the Atlantic.

Of course you might think that people from Atlanta would do better by flying to New York or Toronto or Houston first, but the problem is that those flights out of Atlanta are very expensive as well.

Last year (in 2013) when I ran a slightly smaller version of this same test, I found that about 10% of the cheapest fares were for nonstops, and many other nonstops were close to the lowest overall fare. It was probably more like 25% when you consider that more than half of the city pairs tested don’t even have nonstop flights as an option.

This year I didn’t find any examples of this, and the gap between the cheapest fare and the cheapest nonstop fare got much wider. It’s clear that the airlines have each pushed up their nonstop fares to Europe to as near the breaking point as possible. If I owned an airline I’d probably do it too, but the point for us travelers is that nonstop flights now occupy territory between connecting flights and business class seats. Those who insist on a nonstop flight will pay dearly for it.

Some examples:

New York City to Istanbul

• Cheapest: Aeroflot via Moscow – US$860
• Cheapest nonstop: Turkish Airlines – $1,281

The ironic thing here is that Turkish Airlines has great fares to almost everywhere else in Europe, changing planes in Istanbul.

New York City to Amsterdam

• Cheapest: Aer Lingus via Dublin – $932
• Cheapest nonstop: Lufthansa – $1,491

New York City to Rome

• Cheapest: Norwegian via Copenhagen – $917
• Cheapest nonstop: American Airlines – $1,630
• Cheapest Alitalia nonstop: $1,640

Alitalia doesn’t seem to have good fares anywhere in Europe, including to Italy.

New York City to London

• Cheapest: Aer Lingus via Shannon – $872
• Cheapest non-stop: Virgin Atlantic – $1,413

New York City to London is one of the world’s busiest international routes so you might assume that competition would be fierce. But nonstops on FinnAir, British Airways, Iberia, American, Delta, and United were all between $1,413 and $1,464. In other words, the airlines treat the nonstops as a premium product, so they only compete within a narrow range that is about 50% higher than the 1-stop flights.

A recent trend has seen airlines justifying all the new fees and service changes as methods of controlling their massive jet-fuel bills. Every last possible thing has been examined and reworked in order to make each plane as light as possible (while we passengers keep getting heavier anyway). But when you examine these trans-Atlantic airfares, it’s hard to be sympathetic to their cause.

There is literally an inverse relationship to the distances these flights travel and how much they charge for a seat. In other words, the longer flights with longer and less convenient connections are cheaper than convenient ones, and nonstop flights are the most expensive of all.

Some examples, again:

New York City to Rome

• Cheapest: Norwegian via Copenhagen – US$917
• Next cheapest: SAS via Oslo – $923
• Cheapest nonstop: American Airlines – $1,630

New York City to Istanbul

• Cheapest: Aeroflot via Moscow – US$860
• Cheapest nonstop: Turkish Airlines – $1,281

These are only two examples of dozens that I encountered during this test.

Flying to Rome through Denmark or Norway adds several thousand kilometers to the total trip, as does flying to Istanbul through Moscow. Yet somehow they can still make a profit and offer the lowest fares on that route overall.

If conserving jet fuel is such a high priority, you wonder why airlines encourage flyers to use so much extra by offering the lowest prices on the longest routes? And what about the environmental concerns of providing incentives to passengers to travel the greatest distance to get the lowest fares?

It’s not labor and facility costs

When you see that Aeroflot offers cheap fares through Moscow you might assume that they can offer lower fares because labor costs in Russia tend to be lower than in Western Europe.

But Norwegian, SAS, and SWISS all have low fares on their awkwardly connecting flights as well, and those airlines operate in the most expensive labor markets in the world, not to mention all the other costs of doing business in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Switzerland.

All of the oddities mentioned above only prove that each airline is trying to make the most money they can from every seat that they fly. And unless you live in Atlanta, it’s hard to blame them for that. Air travel has generally never been more affordable to the masses than it is today, and for that I’m grateful.

The algorithms for maximizing revenue for each seat on each flight get more sophisticated every year, and these are the new (or at least current) realities. We just have to do our best to be aware of them, and vote with our feet by not patronizing airlines that are offering prices that seem unfair.

Unfortunately, most of us continue to complain endlessly about companies like Ryanair and Spirit Airlines, and then just keep flying them because they still offer the lowest fares. It all boils down to supply and demand, multiplied by the unfortunate lack of real competition in places like Atlanta.