When people find out I’m a fareologist, they always want to talk about airfares. And recently, I keep hearing that “it’s getting so expensive to fly on the West Coast.” People in Seattle say it. People in San Francisco say it. Even people in Los Angeles say it.
I haven’t heard the same gripes from my friends on the East Coast. So I decided to dig into the data and find out: Are things really that much worse out here?
First, I compared the price histories for two “down the coast” trips: New York (JFK) to Miami (MIA), and Seattle (SEA) to Los Angeles (LAX):
From the graph, it’s clear that prices for the West Coast trip have risen more and faster than fares for the East Coast trip. But these are just two sample routes. To get a more complete picture, I looked at every domestic airport, grouped by time zone. Then I compared the current average prices for August travel with the same prices from four weeks ago:
From this analysis, I can see that prices from West Coast origins are not only more expensive than fares originating in the rest of the country, but they’ve risen by almost twice as much! To see what’s driving this, I then examined fares for all possible time zone combinations, and again looked at the 4-week price change:
What this tells me is first, that coast-to-coast fares are brutal right now, having risen 23% in just 4 weeks. And second, prices for trips between the West Coast and any domestic destination are way up. For example, traveling between one West Coast city and another costs an average of 15% more than it did a month ago. (Compare that to trips within the East Coast, where corresponding prices are only 5% higher on average.)
This colorful chart is a vivid reminder that, even though we fareologists often talk about how “airfares are rising” or “airfares are falling,” there are all sorts of subtleties in the particular price movements. And understanding those subtleties can often help you save money. Happy travels!
Got a question? Feel free to leave me a comment on the blog or send me a tweet.
I live in the West Coast, and I always notice these days that it's becoming too expensive to fly. When will this change for better? Or will it keep rising?
I guess it will go on increasing as its a pleasured place n every 1 loves to go there.
Bee Raz| www.apnimarzi.com
i wonder if we're supposed to start using our bikes more? so i'm going to hawaii from minneapolis--how long to ride a bike there?
The title is Why? but it doesn't answer why.
I live in Florida, and it's often more expensive for me to fly to NY than it is for a NY resident to fly to here....same cities, same airline, and actually the same flights.
Rick
rick has the appropriate question > still no reason why?
See, this is what happens when they don't let me choose the titles for my blog posts. I didn't write about the "why" because I didn't have much useful to say about it.
At a high level, prices spiked about 10% across the board right at the beginning of July. But these price changes didn't take, except for the West Coast markets. By July 10 or so, the prices for non West Coast flights were roughly back to where they were in late June.
Since then prices have risen back up across the board, but it's that first price change that drove the coast to coast difference.
I am trying to search for flights ,by bing travel .I got to select a lot of options like airport, price range, time etc.,which is wonderful , but it wouldnt let me include my kid (just has the option of selecting no of adults).Is there any workaround or any other thoughts? Please help
What? Why would you answer a question if you don't know the answer?
