In case anybody's planning a vacation, flights to Europe are incredibly cheap. Some upstart airlines -- Norwegian, Emirates and WOW are totally shaking up the market and the major carriers are having to respond.
I haven't seen this in 25 years. Closest thing to these prices were in the in the wake of 9/11.
We grabbed $450 round trips (nonstops!) JFK-Milan on Emirates last spring and again for this fall. Flights to Milan have been competitive for a couple of years now. But now $500-700 round trips to all over Europe and UK are showing up all over the east coast.
I've seen $495 RT to London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam etc. This morning Air France started offering $450 RT to Paris, which is crazy until I saw why -- WOW airlines (headquartered in Iceland, hub is in Reykjavik) is flying BWI to Paris-CDG for as low as $350 RT which is just crazy.
Some of this is unsustainable but some of it is real -- transatlantic is finally starting to get competitive.
And the best may be yet to come. The next generation of narrow-body planes (737s for Boeing, A319s and 320s for Airbus) are going to have legitimate transatlantic range. So the actual per-seat operating cost of flying NY to London or NY to Paris is only going to be maybe 10-20% greater than, say, NY to Los Angeles. Those planes are going to be delivered in the next 2-4 years.
And some of the ultra-low cost European carriers like Ryanair and Easyjet are just itching to invade the US (and of course American and United are lobbying like crazy to keep them out). Ryanair makes a lot of its money on bag fees and onboard gambling, and if they bring that model to transatlantic, you could see $200 round trips to Dublin and London.
Because of Open Skies, international routes are finally shaping up to be highly competitive in the way that domestic routes in the U.S. are not.
I haven't seen this in 25 years. Closest thing to these prices were in the in the wake of 9/11.
We grabbed $450 round trips (nonstops!) JFK-Milan on Emirates last spring and again for this fall. Flights to Milan have been competitive for a couple of years now. But now $500-700 round trips to all over Europe and UK are showing up all over the east coast.
I've seen $495 RT to London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam etc. This morning Air France started offering $450 RT to Paris, which is crazy until I saw why -- WOW airlines (headquartered in Iceland, hub is in Reykjavik) is flying BWI to Paris-CDG for as low as $350 RT which is just crazy.
Some of this is unsustainable but some of it is real -- transatlantic is finally starting to get competitive.
And the best may be yet to come. The next generation of narrow-body planes (737s for Boeing, A319s and 320s for Airbus) are going to have legitimate transatlantic range. So the actual per-seat operating cost of flying NY to London or NY to Paris is only going to be maybe 10-20% greater than, say, NY to Los Angeles. Those planes are going to be delivered in the next 2-4 years.
And some of the ultra-low cost European carriers like Ryanair and Easyjet are just itching to invade the US (and of course American and United are lobbying like crazy to keep them out). Ryanair makes a lot of its money on bag fees and onboard gambling, and if they bring that model to transatlantic, you could see $200 round trips to Dublin and London.
Because of Open Skies, international routes are finally shaping up to be highly competitive in the way that domestic routes in the U.S. are not.
