Air Travel is Cheap Now, but Discounts Won’t Last

By JOE SHARKEY
Published: March 16, 2009

WORRIED about filling seats, airlines have hit the panic button. Amazing air fare sales are breaking out all over. Actually, the sales are breaking out mostly on routes where the competition is heavy or business travel has really plummeted.

Not only is the extent of the discounts extraordinary — $158 for a round-trip ticket between Denver and Houston on a sale announced Monday by Frontier Airlines; $548 on Delta between New York and Dublin; $598 round trip between Los Angeles or New York to Australia in Qantas. The time frame is often extraordinary as well. Fare sales like these are usually limited to slack travel periods in winter. Many of these extend into the summer.

I sort these fares on the major travel aggregator sites like Kayak, TripAdvisor, Fly.com and FareCompare, which make comparison shopping easy. If you’re flexible (Saturday night stay requirements are often tucked into these fares to make them unattractive to business travelers), shop around and have a ball. It’s a great time for cheap travel.

And it’s not going to last.

Two fundamental shifts in air travel are under way. One is that airlines are horrified at the falloff in passenger traffic and are scrubbing flights, dropping routes and parking more planes in the desert to shrink capacity, even beyond announced reductions, to keep planes flying full.

And two, the “unbundling” of services that began with charges for snacks and checked bags is emerging as the new economic model for the shrunken air travel system.

Forget about the guy from Ryanair who recently got all that publicity by speculating about installing pay toilets on planes. Instead, look at the methodical way that the domestic airlines are planning for a future in which booking a flight will be a little like ordering from a Chinese takeout menu. That is, it will be efficient, user friendly and full of à la carte choices.

“Three or four years ago, airlines got fed up with their tickets being priced like bushels of wheat on a commodities exchange, so they set out a strategy for how to make prices less transparent,” said Rick Seaney, the chief executive of FareCompare.com.

The strategy was based on imposing extra fees on an increasing number of amenities and services — not just checked bags and in-flight pillows, but an expanding range of add-ons like exit row seats, priority seating and boarding, in-flight entertainment or Wi-Fi, and on and on.

These fees raise cash for the airlines. But they annoy customers, who are having a hard time figuring out what a trip costs once they make their choices. Usually, they find out when they arrive at the airport or on board the flight. As I said last week, TripAdvisor.com added a useful feature to its flight search site that lets you click on the thousands of itinerary options, including fee-based services, so you can get the actual price.

The airlines are aware that customers shop around online and that they hate trying to figure out fees. So they are currently working with other ticket distributors on a complex system that Mr. Seaney said will expand the fee checklists and allow all distributors, whether an airline itself or an online travel agency, to be more uniformly precise in just what a customer is ordering.

“They’ll present a base ticket price in three or four categories, and then you’ll have a bunch of things you can add,” Mr. Seaney said. “You’ll get a base price quote, and then you’ll have a bunch of columns with choices that add something to the ticket. You going to see a whole new slew of amenities that you pay for in advance.”

Mr. Seaney is on an “optional services” committee formed by the Airline Tariff Publishing Company, the global leader in collecting and distributing airline fare data.

The committee is evaluating the universe of fee-based extra services, and drawing up lists of uniform codes to make it easier to “compare applies to apples,” Mr. Seaney said.

Among the items on that growing list are the usual things like prepaid checked bag (code 0AA), snack (0AT), aisle seat exit row (0A5), beverage (0AX), video games (0AF), passenger assistance (0BY) and wheelchair (0AH)

Wait, “wheelchair” has an optional services code? OMG!

E-mail: jsharkey@nytimes.com

E-mail: jsharkey@nytimes.com