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Comment by insaneirish | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting how major airlines competing with them has made things worse for everyone. I have many times seen passengers ignorant about what "basic economy" means (or at least feigning ignorance) and it leads to passengers trying to negotiate seat swapping on their own, or gate agents getting involved when it's a young child getting separated. All of it leads to boarding delays, which leads to delays pushing back, which leads to sequencing delays for takeoff.

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> interesting how major airlines competing with them has made things worse for everyone

It's been great for the poor and middle class. Tickets are cheap, before taxes and regulatory charges. Go to Europe and you see what competition can truly bring: <$50 tickets.

Here's where you can go direct from Barcelona with a carry on for $100 max: https://www.google.com/travel/explore?tfs=CBwQAxoQKABqDAgDEg...

And the same for San Francisco: https://www.google.com/travel/explore?tfs=CBwQAxoQKABqDAgDEg...

Based on these I think airfare in the US looks better, especially considering the longer distances. Barcelona-London is the same price as San Francisco-Denver but 75% as far for example.

Major problem with your survey there: Google travel doesn't appear to cover Ryanair or easyJet, or most of the other major European budget airlines. Select London Stansted, say (from which there are uncountable <100eur flights) and you only get one (because Stansted is mostly budget airline focused).

Your data is, more or less "if you ignore the budget airlines, there are few cheap flights from Barcelona", which is true, but not particularly useful. Dublin<>Barcelona, say, tends to be 25eur each way when there's not much demand, including taxes and charges (though you'll pay extra if you want to take _bags_).

If you had just clicked on any of the destinations in the link, you would see that it shows Ryanair and easyJet as options.

Huh. Weird. It's showing them as options if you click in (sometimes cheaper than the headline option) but if they're the only option under the price point it doesn't seem to show them (set it to Stansted to see).

EDIT: Ah, I found the problem (I suspect this is a bug in Google's flight thing). They had carry-on bags set to 1. If you set it to 0 it shows flights (mostly Ryanair) to almost everywhere in Europe. It may be getting tripped up by Ryanair's wonky treatment of carry-on bags (you can add 'priority boarding', which gets you a carry-on, as an extra fairly cheaply, but if you want it as a headline feature it comes bundled with a bunch of other stuff).

Even with this option off, though, it's still not showing easyJet.

Barcelona is one of the most visited cities in the world for tourism. SF, not so much.

Competition, low taxation (kerosene isn't taxed), and completely ignoring all externalities. (Not that the US is very different in those)

Why not count taxes and regulatory charges ?

A lot of those flights in Europe are pretty short. You can get pretty cheap flights from Boston to Washington, DC, or from Houston to Denver, too. (Texas is about the size of France, so Houston to Denver would be roughly equivalent to Paris to mid-Europe)

anecdotally, that's not what i recently experienced. I used to envy cheap cross-Europe flights, but somehow nowadays I can fly from SF direct to Paris for $250 or Cancun direct for $150 (cheaper than roundtrip Uber to SFO)... local Europe travel didn't feel that much cheaper all of a sudden.

Which airline is that cheap from SF to Paris? Sounds interesting. I'm in Europe myself

French Bee nonstop $265 one way, SAS with one stop $219 for next couple of weeks i checked

Thanks! I'll look into those. That's really great prices.

> or at least feigning ignorance

"Basic economy" as a category is only about ten years old, and most people don't fly much.

I am also not sure if it is uniform across airlines?

Disagree. Airfare has been one of the most deflationary parts of the economy this century because of budget airlines. I paid $3(plus taxes) to fly from utah to arizona because of sprit. If you fly with any regularity the rules are easy to follow, especially solo.

My last holiday I was under the wrong assumption that I was allowed to check in luggage. It cost me 60 euro at the airport desk for a single bag. Won't make that mistake again.

Don't think it's even that. All they had to do was match or get close to Spirts fares until they drove them out of business. The major carriers don't need to collude, it's part of their playbook and apparent when they go after a route or market. AA, Delta, and United could afford to lose money on routes longer than Spirit could. It's a shame if Spirit doesn't make it.

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