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Flying is cheap as chips – but no chips

by Gareth Powell

Here's a bit of airline history which I had the devil of a job researching. In 1951 fewer than ten percent of the population of the United States had flown and the number that had flown internationally was miniscule. The standard round trip fare New York - London was $US711.

53 years later exactly that same price is available today from Virgin Atlantic, despite changes in the cost of living. It's difficult to adjust this to today's prices simply on the cost of living because there are so many different and varying factors.

One way is to take a basic commodity, a house.

In 1951 a three bed-roomed house in England at that time cost just over five times this, depending on how you look at the dollar exchange. (The house was in Ridgeway Drive, Bromley, Kent and I know the prices precisely.)

So you can take it that in 1951 the cost of flying from New York to London and back was a fifth of the price of a house in the outer suburbs of London. The same house, in the same suburb would now cost $US362,000 so that the equivalent air fare to house price would be something daft like $70,000. A totally unfair comparison and the price could be calculated another way to bring it down to, say, nearer $10,000.

It does not change one fact; the face price of the ticket has not changed in 50-odd years, although everything else has soared upwards.

Another example from Professor Peter Fitzroy, speaking in Australia on the government broadcasting service (the ABC) about Money, Markets and the Economy. He said, although he provided no reference to back it up, "How many of us realise that in 1945 the cost of the air fare between Melbourne and London was about twice the annual salary in Australia? By 1998, the cost had plummeted to about three to four weeks salary."

Bear that in mind for what follows.

It's difficult to find the exact date, but sometime in 1986 American Airlines decided it had to save money and so it cut a single olive from the salad that was served to passengers. It was the start of cost-cutting exercises which, among American airlines, continue to this day.

This year the pace has warmed up with pillows, magazines and baggage service being trimmed or charged for. Then Northwest added pretzel sticks.

Now, in the United States, anyone flying from A to B gets the flight and that is it. Many overseas travelers, used to having food served free on board, are finding that flying internally in the United States can mean a long hungry journey.

Two possible answers.

The first is to pay seriously more money and fly in first and business class. The price differential between economy - that which Americans call coach - and business and first class has expanded.

The second is to fly with an el-cheapo, cut price airline. One of the problems for the major airlines who have cut passengers' amenities back to the bone is that in the United States it is now relatively more luxurious to fly on one of the low-fare airlines like JetBlue, Southwest and Song, which offer quite reasonable luxuries.

Just remember to take your sandwiches with you.

Gareth Powell is a journalist and author who runs a web site on travel, www.travelhopefully.com

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