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There have been so many drastic changes with airline ticket pricing behavior in the past few months that I figured it was about time I decided to put out my daily analysis of the airfare filing activity – concentrating on the cheapest prices for flights across the globe.
Reviewing last night’s 8pm domestic U.S. airfare filing activity I see the following:
- AirTran filed a system wide airfare sale with new lows in 773 city pairs with average roundtrip price drop of $80 roundtrip. Biggest winners in the sale are Atlanta (their hub with 53 city pairs is down an average $127), Branson, Missouri (48 city pairs down an average of $123 roundtrip) and Newport News (41 city pairs down an average of $133 roundtrip). AirTran seems to have this sort of filing activity every few Mondays, so your best time to shop for airline tickets on AirTran is Tuesday morning
- United Airlines readjusted airfares in numerous small cities like Helena, Kalispell, and Casper, dropping its cheapest prices an average of $43. The biggest winner cities averaging over a $100 average price drop were Springfield, Wausau, Traverse City, Peoria, and Greenville
- There was a ton of filing activity related to Canada as almost all the remaining legacy airlines dropped prices to several Canadian cities. WestJet and Air Canada have both been very active recently and prices for flights between the U.S. and Canada have been very volatile, swinging hundreds of dollars roundtrip each week. If you are buying in these markets, you need to sign up for our airline ticket price drop alerts so you don’t get caught in the up cycle
- Southwest Airlines had a lot of activity which I document in a special separate post.
On the international side, in the last 4 airfare feeds (of 5 daily), pricing activity was very volatile with some unbelievable deals – here is a brief rundown:
o US Airways drops prices from 155 cities to Tel Aviv by an average of $132 roundtrip, with new service this summer from Philadelphia and code shares with Lufthansa – you can get some real steals right now
o American Airlines dropped prices to Helsinki by an average of $70 roundtrip from 33 cities
o Continental dropped prices to Seoul by an average of $400 from 7 cities including Austin, Baltimore, Charlotte, Las Vegas, Orlando, Pittsburgh and Providence
o Delta dropped its price on Charlotte to Rome for travel through mid-May by $226 roundtrip ($605 including all taxes/fees)
o US Airways knocked off $100 roundtrip from 23 cities to San Jose, Costa Rica for travel through the end of May
o AeroMexico dropped Washington to Cancun by $260 roundtrip ($340 all included)
o Continental matched US Airways’ drop of $400 on average to Seoul
o American dropped prices from a dozen cities to Beijing by several hundred dollars (San Francisco is its largest departure city) |
