Airfares

How airfares are set is hard to understand.

My first trip to Europe was in May 1973.  I flew Swissair: Montreal to Zurich, Zurich to Salzburg, and return.    

As I recall, the airfare was about $200. According to the Inflation Calculator at DollarTimes those $200 are the equivalent to about $1,062 at current rates.  

I’ve just booked tickets to Lisbon through a cheap-airfare search engine. Some observations:

• At $454.61 the taxes and fees are over half (58%) of the total price; 
• The price of the return flight is surprisingly low; less than one-third of the equivalent of what I paid many years ago. Even if all the taxes and fees are included, the price of $773.61 / fare is significantly lower.

One  explanation of today’s lower fares could be due to increased efficiencies.  So while I don’t have any complaints about the total price,  segregating input costs strikes me as a bit like sausage making: it’s like going to a car dealer to see a sticker price of $1,000 and then additional fees for the rubber, steel, and plastic used in the fabrication.  As a step towards transparency, I might be able to muster some sympathy for airlines as they grapple with  wide fluctuations in oil prices and local airport taxes as a means to explain fare changes.  However, going directly to the airline I found the fare was double.  One might think the discrepancy is charter vs. name brand, but no.  The discounted fare I purchased  is for exactly the same flights on the same airlines.  

For the casual observer this is hard to understand. So I won’t.  I’ll direct my energies to planning the trip and maybe including another site on the itinerary funded by the savings.