I was just doing some research on prices and thought it might be interesting to quickly share the answer to one of the most common questions I get:

“How much have airline ticket prices gone up since last year?”

I hate this question because the true answer requires another question “Where do you live?”, because smaller airports have taken it on the chin and larger metros with low cost carrier competition have had modest increases and many others are in between.

One of the many things we track is the average cheapest published airline ticket price between the top 50 cities by passenger traffic, the chart is below — note that prices are up 20% since 1-Jan-07 and up 12% since 6-May-07 (1 year ago). I like the cheapest published indicator for “% increases” because leisure fares aren’t normally increased as much as business fares so it shows a good floor.