Tourist Information
Why so much inequality in the prices of airline tickets between the same jobs?
Should they all be competitive and to give similar price and take a few dollars for “services”? Delta Air Bombay-London (via New York) round trip costs $ 4,316. 00 (+ tax) (Source: website of Delta), while my local agent travel Bombay-New York (return) for Emirates, Thai Air, Etihad, Singapore Airlines at $ 900 + tax (return). Air India may even $ 800 + tax (return) is. In addition, Bombay-London-Mumbai only $ 500 (plus tax) returns for airlines like Finn Air, Virgin Atlantic, Jet Airways, Air France, Thai Air, Singapore Airlines, but the same, Austrian Airlines, Lufthansa, Swiss Air and SAS will be $ 1,200 or more (plus taxes) .- Can you explain the math here? And usually I find websites are much more expensive than the Travel Agents for an airline called Tiger Airways, whose website is very economical rates between India and Asia-Pacific
There are several reason for these ticket prices.
Each flight has several tickets sold at different bands, with each band a different cost. Once all the lower band is sold then the higher ticket price is sold. This is to encourage people to buy earlier and the airline will be able to budget better.
Some airline get subsidies to fly into airports and different tax rates are applied. Also planes that fly at different times have different popularity’s, most people prefer to early – mid morning rather than 1am. Since these are sold out flights prices can increase for them.
The reason why it is illegal for airlines to agree on fixed price is that airlines should compete to lower the price if they have more competition, Although this doesn’t seem to happen.
BA and a few different airlines had got together and agreed a pricing scheme. They were prosecuted for price fixing when Virgin, who were partners but had negotiated out of prosecution by supplying all the information, told on them.