US Airways Reservations

What determines airline ticket price in turmoil?

What determines airline ticket prices in social unrest or natural disaster? So I had assumed that when certain citites around the world experience social unrest (political problems, civil violence) or natural disasters happen (floods, earthquake, ect...) that airline ticket prices would be cheap! But on the contrary, the price of the airline tickets don't seem to drop. Why would the plane tickets remain about the same during problamtic events as in non-problamatic? I remember researching the price of airline tickets when the Iraq war began many years ago and the airline tickets were high! Same goes for other places that faced some dis-order. So if airline ticket prices are not decreased during any turmoil what determines its prices?

Public Comments

1. Airlines divide their fares into "buckets" meaning sub-categories within the fare cabins. So you may have Coach/Economy, Business Class and First Class on a particular plane, and customers will make reservations for "one business class ticket" but there's really a long list of fare codes mixed in there. The fare buckets are set when the flight first goes on sale. Using coach for an example, the airline might have buckets M, N and R (but realistically they will have a lot more). They will say in advance "we'll sell 9 M-class tickets at $220 each, 15 N-class tickets at $240 each" and so forth. The inventory is sold from the lowest-priced bucket and when those 9 $220 tickets are sold out, it rolls automatically over to the next cheapest bucket. Keep going till the plane is sold out. When there's a sale, they don't change the prices, they simply change the bucket that is being offered (take some of the N tickets and move them back over to M fares). This is why you will sometimes see an advertised fare that increases when you try to book for two people and goes back down when you change your booking to one person--- because there is only one fare left in the M bucket, and to accomodate two people, they have to sell the next bucket up. In terms of problematic vs. non-problematic areas, the airlines are in it to make money, not to help travellers get out of harm's way. So as the demand goes up, the cheaper buckets are all sold out and someone wishing to leave the earthquake zone only has very expensive options to choose from. As time goes by, the airline will adjust the bucketing, or if it's a very long term issue (like Hurricane Katrina) increase the base fare of each bucket when the flight is first announced. This is because they may have extra fees incurred at the problem-area airport (higher gate fees charged by the airport, money spent repairing equipment, etc) or because they have fewer flights in/out of that city. Either way, they're trying to recoup their losses and maximize profits.