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These days strange things are taking place regarding travel costs: at the same time that traditional airlines particularly and transport companies in general are increasing their fees for travel tickets of all sorts blaming the surge in oil prices, discount companies are in fact, lowering their costs.

This is easily seen in the case of the commercial aviation industry, but it also affects bus companies, railways as well as shipping and ferry companies. We will comment about the case of airlines because is the most self-evident, and also because it would be somewhat tedious to analyse each kind of transportation system.

To see how much influence oil prices really have on the final cost of an air ticket or airfare, we will focus on two different cases belonging to the aircraft industry in a broad sense:

The firs one is the case of discount companies; these use the same aircraft as the traditional companies and thus, spend as much fuel as their older siblings. In a broad sense, fuel represents about 33% of the cost per hour or distance in which an aircraft operator incurs each time a plane flies.

Thus, this means that if oil prices really are behind air fare increments of over 100% in some cases, discount companies would have had also to increase their prices significantly, for there is no way in which they could have turned that 33% that fuel represents in the cost of use of an aircraft into something so small that it would have become insignificant in the final count.

Yet, discount airlines have barely increased their prices, the aircraft remain the same, schedules remain in place and there has been no particular incidence in travel safety in terms of more incidents or accidents.

And the second place were we looked is general aviation: going to a small airport where you only find private and executive aircraft you will soon find out that while rental and flight-hour prices have gone up somewhat in FBOs, flight schools, etc. that increment is in no way the same as what can be seen in the case of major airlines.

This proves that while indeed, oil prices have an influence in the final cost of flying, big airlines are just putting forward excuses destined to put the blame on fuel costs, while they are increasing the fares for other reasons, and that means, in order to increase their profits?

Indeed, having a profitable business is their right, but they are not being honest and straightforward with the public and their customers. So independent websites like this one where you can check and compare fares and services are essential for the benefit of travellers of all kinds.

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