The good news? Fewer people will take to the skies this summer. The bad news? It'll still be hell.
The Air Transport Association predicts 211 million passengers will take a flight somewhere this summer, down from 214 million last summer. With vacationers getting squeezed by food and gas prices, fewer people are going to shell out for airfare, although filling the tank and hitting the road on vacation will be a pricey proposition, too. And with the economy continuing to soften, businesses are cutting back on travel, further cutting into passenger numbers.
But if you think fewer passengers means fewer hassles at the airport and more empty seats on the planes, think again.
With fewer people flying, airlines are scaling back service. United Airlines is cutting 5 percent of its capacity out of its Denver hub, American Airlines is dropping flights from Dallas and JetBlue has canceled flights out of LAX before they even started. These cuts mean significantly fewer seats available to consumers, which helps airlines in several ways.
Fewer seats create more demand reduces supply, which drives up prices. Beyond that, airlines have a huge incentive to fly their planes as full as possible. It costs about the same to fly a plane from Atlanta to
Seattle if it's 85 percent full or only half full. Every passenger an airline can squeeze onto a flight means more revenue to offset those fixed costs.
Here's a hypothetical example: American Airlines runs ten flights a day between Boston and Chicago. They're all 136-seat
MD-80s, so we're talking 1,360 seats per day and approximately 490,000
seats a year. If American cuts just one of those daily flights, total seats drop to 1,224 a day and 445,000 seats per year. American hopes that by offering 45,000 fewer seats on that route in a year, it can charge more per seat, keep its planes fuller and make more money.
One analyst thinks that capacity cuts could reach 20 percent. That's like shutting down American Airlines and its 4,000 daily flights.
You think your flight is crowded now? Just wait a few months and you could be begging for that middle seat.
Photo courtesy Flickr user lunchtimemama.
