Domestic air travel pricing

quickymart:

I know people can't really travel internationally anymore with coronavirus raging around the world, so I thought I'd head south over the July school holidays with family to see my family.

I last made this trip in 2016, so it's been a while. For 2 adults + 2 children, back then it was $664, which was reasonable enough.

Trying to book now and the same trip is over $1000! Holy Christ, I can't believe it! 18 months ago it would have cost way less than that!
This is on Air NZ - Jetstar is not much cheaper (and you don't get a bag), and looking around all the travel sites I can't seem to find anything remotely (what I would call) realistic pricing.

Even reducing it to one adult, the best I can find is around $800. Is this really meant to entice people to travel around New Zealand?

I can understand international travel would be costly now as hardly anyone is travelling compared to, say, late 2019, but would have thought domestic flights would be far, far, far cheaper than this. Granted it's the school holidays, but come on.

Edit: also, are airlines not doing child's fares anymore? The pricing for children and adults seems to be exactly the same; I remember children's fares also used to be cheaper.

I found a much better fare for the October school holidays (around $600 for 4), so I'll probably go with that.

Sooooo many different issues in that to discuss.

Firstly the simple answer is that no, airfares have not changed significantly over the last 5 years. There is hard pricing data available to show that. Air NZ even cut a lot of domestic airfare prices in March this year. To add to that Air NZ like most other airlines are still losing significant amount of money every single day just operating.

The biggest issue is that most people don't understand how airline pricing works. You've got up to 4 different booking classes on each flight (and then 4 different combinations of fare basis) meaning there could mean that on a full A320 that there were up to 56 different fare price points that were paid. Typically speaking the further out you book, the better chance you have of picking up one of the lower priced fare buckets.

Most people also have zero understanding of how much it actually costs to fly a plane around, and the real world reality is that any ticket on a plane sold for under say $100 is being sold at a loss.

A lot of people have some crazy idea what because you can get a $49 seat on a main trunk jet flight that every seat on every domestic flight should be $49, and the downside of this is we have a huge fare range in NZ - if you look at flights between WLG and AKL for example they range between $49 and $376 because the higher priced fares are needed to effectively subsidise the lower cost seats. Entry level airfares in NZ are a bargain compared to so many other countries.

School holidays are always the worst time to fly - flights are guaranteed to be chokka so booking this close you're not going to be getting cheap fares as all the cheap fare buckets will be gone.

quickymart

sbiddle