Cheap Airline Seats Getting Harder to Find

Cheap airline tickets are in short supply, as commercial carriers cut capacity and struggle to keep surging jet fuel prices from weighing them down.

Tickets for business travelers are 19 percent more expensive than they were a year ago, while leisure fares have been swinging wildly up to 15 percent higher in recent weeks, according to Bob Harrell, whose New York-based research firm, Harrell Associates, tracks airfares. When asked how he goes about buying his own plane tickets, Harrell relayed a simple strategy: "I pray."

Domestic airline passengers paid 12.4 percent more per mile in February than a year earlier and more than any month since June 2001, according to the Air Transport Association.

Much of that revenue went to the $2.6 billion fuel bill U.S. airlines racked up in February, when they were paying 37 percent more for jet fuel than they were the year before.

Nick Coste, a 70-year-old salesman from Philadelphia who was flying out of Charleston on Wednesday, said anybody who owns a car understands the economic forces at play.

"I pulled up the futures (markets) the other day and oil was at $71-something a barrel," he said. "I know that's going right into airfares."

Coste's wife, Anne, does most of the household ticket-buying. She is a self-described pro at online reservations and picks over about five different Web sites before booking. She was making a beeline for security Thursday, but a question about airfares turned her around quickly.

"It's getting harder and harder to get a deal," she said. "You can drop $1,100 or $1,200 without blinking an eye."

Seats are selling for more, in part, because there are fewer of them. In recent months, the beleaguered U.S. airline industry cut routes and grounded inefficient planes in a widespread bid for solvency. The two or three airlines making money were the only outfits cautiously expanding.

In March, Delta Air Lines Inc., which handles close to half of all Charleston air travelers, had 12.4 percent less capacity than a year ago. As a result, its planes were 81.1 percent full on average, compared with a 79.6 percent load factor in March 2004.

"It's sort of a 'must' and 'can' environment for raising prices," said Tim Sieber, an analyst with the Boyd Group, an airline consulting firm in Colorado.

The situation is particularly bad in Charleston, where airfares historically are higher than the national average.

In the last year, the Charleston airport gradually lost 300 outgoing seats a day as Independence Air went out of business and Delta cut eight of its 25 daily departures in the weeks after its November bankruptcy filing. A lot of Charleston travel buyers reported that flights out of the local airport have been fully booked on weekends this spring.

The Charleston Battery soccer team probably will fly to an upcoming game in Montreal in waves, according to John Powers, whose Travel Management Group agency handles the team's booking. Getting the entire squad on one plane would cost $900 a player, compared with $468 if they book on a few different flights, Powers said.

Because the industry as a whole is relatively fat and happy, Sieber and other analysts said, travelers should not bank on price wars this summer.

"Previously, there were situations where airlines would smell blood in the water and say 'Let's have a sale and try to run someone out of business,' " Sieber explained. "But we now have a more rational environment in the pricing."

So-called "meet-the-payroll" monthly sales that struggling carriers dangled in recent months are also ending as the industry's survivors level out.

Aside from invoking higher power, the experts suggest shopping early and often for upcoming trips. Cheap seats are still out there, but there are a lot fewer of them.

And efforts to cash in frequent-flier miles will probably be futile for some time.

"If you look at the way these leisure fares jump around from week to week, you wonder if anybody is at the wheel," Harrell said. "The trick is to shop around and be patient and know what's a good price."

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