Airfares in Houston Could Offer Bargains This Summer Compared With Smaller Cities

May 20—While airfares across the U.S. have surged during the past year by at least 10 percent, Houston travelers this summer might find some relative bargains at the city's two airports, new data suggests.

Domestic airfares have jumped by an average of 17 percent compared with this time last year, according to the annual report from California-based online travel agency CheapAir.com. But Houston has seen the smallest airfare increase in Texas and one of the most modest increases among dozens of departure cities: an average of 11 percent since last year for domestic flight, according to CheapAir. Only two cities — Oakland, Calif., and Manchester, N.H., — had smaller fare increases, an average of 10 percent.

The report, conducted annually, looked at 128 million airfares for 74 cities from March 1 to April 19.

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The biggest increases were found in smaller markets, CheapAir said, likely because of simple supply and demand. Smaller airports offer fewer flights from fewer airlines in the first place, and in some cases routes serving those cities have been cut. Average fares at Flint, Mich., and Akron, Ohio, have skyrocketed by more than 30 percent in the past year.

In Houston, by contrast, competition from a robust number of carriers has helped keep airfares relatively affordable — and both of the city's major airports have been bustling thus far this year. Houston Airport System statistics show that demand for travel has roughly returned to pre-pandemic levels. In March, the most recent month for which complete data is available, more than 4.4 million travelers passed through IAH and HOU, a 14 percent increase over March 2022, right in line with the nearly 4.4 million travelers who used the two airports in February 2020, just before the pandemic.

That trend is likely to continue this summer, officials say.

"We expect it to be busy for sure," said Augusto Bernal, director of communications for Houston Airports.

Over the upcoming Memorial Day weekend — May 25 to May 29 — airport leaders say they expect 704,000 passengers to pass through IAH and 212,000 through Hobby. That would amount to a 5 percent increase over the same holiday weekend in 2022 and a 3 percent increase over 2019.

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