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This afternoon in the 12:30pm EST domestic U.S. airfare distribution the FareCompare.com proprietary airfare processing system noted significant system wide airfare increase rollback activity related to the United Airlines $50 roundtrip fuel surcharge increase attempt late last week. Delta Air Lines and US Airways rolled back to pre-increase levels on Friday leaving only Northwest Airlines remaining with the increase - Northwest has been slower both matching and rolling back than other airlines and at this point has no choice but to rollback to stay competitive. |
FareCompare.com contacted several airlines — United spokesperson Robin Urbanski, who said only, “We rescinded the move to keep our fares competitive with other airlines” and American Airlines representative Tim Wagner echoed those sentiments, saying his carrier rolled back because “We weren’t competitive.”
Most legacy airlines (except some United Airlines markets) had a $20 roundtrip surcharge in place before matching the United 50$ roundtrip fuel surcharge over the weekend - all but Northwest have rolled back to the previous $20 roundtrip fuel surcharge level.
Continental Airlines appears to be the spoiler in this particular increase attempt as they were the first to rollback - in the past lower cost airlines where normally the spoiler but this has not been the case for the past few years as U.S. domestic air travel supply and demand has begun to favor airlines.
This will be the last update on this particular increase unless Northwest fails to rollback later this evening.
How silly. This was yet another example of cheating. It is unfair to constantly assess fees: Just include the costs of doing business in the price and let customers decide fairly!
Comment by bryan in san francisco — January 18, 2008 @ 3:11 pm