Airfares cheaper in Europe than US
Europe’s low-fare carriers may be best known around the world for outrageous proposals to charge for bathroom access or offer stand-up seating, both ideas floated by Ryanair that were never adopted.
But travelers who have flown within Europe lately often took away a different impression that airline tickets were surprisingly inexpensive, especially compared with prices to fly within the United States.
A one-way ticket between Edinburgh and Dublin, for instance, can cost the equivalent of as little as $40. A one-way ticket from New York to Washington, about the same distance, starts at $65. Both prices, which vary depending on the travel date, include taxes and unavoidable fees, but not baggage and other optional charges.
While it is tough to do a statistically rigorous comparison, especially since the European Union does not collect fare data for its 27 members, there is little doubt that ticket prices have fallen sharply within Europe, despite higher fuel costs, because of an explosion of competition from low-fare airlines like Easy Jet and Ryanair. Although Southwest Airlines and other carriers have put similar pressure on prices within the United States, anecdotal
data suggests that it is still generally more expensive to fly between major cities in America than it is to fly between cities in Europe.
It was calculated that airline passengers in Europe last year were paying about 11 cents a mile to travel within a single country, including taxes and fees, or 14 cents a mile to fly between two European countries. In the United States, by contrast, passengers were paying about 23 cents a mile.
The Air Transport Association, the US airlines’ trade group, calculates that domestic tickets in the United States cost about 16 cents a mile, excluding taxes, or at least 19 cents a mile with taxes (using the group’s estimate that taxes add 20 per cent to the price of a ticket).
Carlos Mestre, deputy head of the European Commission’s transport union said the EU did not collect data from airlines that would enable it calculate a similar cost per mile. based on information the commission has gathered, it has published numerous reports that say airfares have decreased significantly since the late 1990s, when the Union began allowing airlines to fly freely among member countries.
“Prices have gone down quite dramatically,” Mestre said, explaining that the rapid expansion of low-fare carriers had increased competition on many routes that were once dominated by a single national airline. The number of routes within Europe has also increased 140 per cent from 1992 to 2010. Low-fare airlines now carry more than a third of all passengers traveling within Europe, forcing older competitors to reduce prices, especially on popular routes. “In Europe, there has been an awful lot more competition in the last 10 years,” said Brian Pearce, chief economist for the International Air Transport Association. “That has led to a lot more choice for passengers as well as it being cheaper to travel.”
Pearce said European travelers had benefited from the fact that many large cities had multiple airports, allowing newer airlines access to these markets. That is not so much the case in the United States, where airlines like Southwest have fought to obtain scarce takeoff and landing slots in congested cities like New York.
European airlines also face more competition than their US counterparts do from other forms of transportation, particularly Europe’s robust rail network. That competition is likely to increase in the coming years, since the EU recently announced an initiative to standardise the information on rail schedules and prices across member countries, making it easier for travelers to compare the cost.
