This evening in the 8:00pm EST domestic airfare distribution, US Airways matched the increase initiated earlier in the day by Delta Air Lines on over 6,000 city pairs. This leaves American, Continental, Northwest, and United yet to match of the six remaining legacy airlines. A quick check of route overlap between US Airways and Southwest Airlines shows the $10 increase in a smattering of common routes with the bulk of overlap city pairs showing no increase. Tip-Toeing around lower cost airlines has been a constant theme in most of the “successful” increases this year…

The six increase attempts so far in 2008 have been sprinkled in with a variety of highly targeted off peak domestic airfare sales, mostly for travel on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. In the past few weeks we have also noted an unusually high number of “one-day-only ” airfare sales on several domestic airlines.

There are 3 airfare distributions on Friday and 1 each on Saturday and Sunday, it is likely that most of the remaining legacy airlines will match during the day tomorrow. Air travelers contemplating purchases on these airlines should do so before noon on Friday to avoid the additional increase.

I will continue update over the next few days as any significant matching or rollback activity occurs related to this attempted increase.

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