There are plenty of places that watch and watch over airlines, for varying reasons. The FAA. Flightradar24. Association of Flight Attendants. The various travel bloggers of BoardingArea…;-)
But if truth be known, people don’t really look to those entities to see what’s going on with airlines. OK yes, frequent fliers and aviation geeks do. But Jamie Q. Public? Probably not so much. They’re watching TV shows like 60 Minutes, The View, 20/20, Inside Edition, etc.
Another well-known, well-trusted TV show is Good Morning America, a.k.a. GMA. On the air since 1975, GMA has won multiple People’s Choice and Emmy awards for its programming. Besides their TV show, GMA also has, not surprisingly, a website that contains videos, shopping and articles. People like GMA and they trust it. So when GMA talks about airline prices, they know that people listen.
GMA recently posted a piece called “Airline tickets expected to drop as fall approaches” and they say travel experts expect flight prices to decrease once summer is over. GMA continues that some predict domestic R/T ticket prices could average below $300 once fall is here. Here are some of the travel experts they quoted to back this up:
- Scott Keyes (the founder of Scott’s Cheap Flights): “Airfares really did shoot up in the spring. [They] went up 12% in March, 19% in April, another 12% in May…. But the good news: In the last inflation report, airfare actually fell 2%, and I think it’s going to fall even further in the next one.”
- Hopper (travel booking platform) suggests that average domestic ticket prices could fall nearly substantially by fall. The average price of a domestic round trip flight right now is about $348, but come mid-September, could be about $298.
Getting away from GMA for a moment, other outlets that Jamie Q. Public may read are also suggesting similar trends:
- Wall Street Journal (July 26, 2022): “Airfares Under $300 Are Coming Back.” Flight prices usually drop in the fall, but this year’s decline from the highs of summer is steeper than usual.
- Forbes (July 18, 2022): Trans-Atlantic Airfares Are High But Will Drop This Fall. They suggest this will be because of fewer testing requirements, increased capacity, business travel not yet fully coming back, restructuring of European and Middle East carriers, and growth of lower-cost carriers.
- ABC (May 17, 2022): “Why are airfares sky-high and will they ever come back down?” This piece also quoted Scott Keyes and Hopper (albeit different quotes than GMA), but at the end of the article, it says, “…Both experts say they expect airfares will start to drop in September and October, when the summer travel season ends and folks go back to work and school.“
- Fortune (July 13, 2022): “Almost everything is getting more expensive, but these 3 things are getting cheaper” (Is THAT a clickbaity title that sounds like I could’ve written it, or what? LOL!). Paragraph of note: “The price surge in airfares last spring was largely due to high fuel prices at the time, which have been on a steady decline this summer. There is also a traditional seasonality to airfare prices, which tend to surge in the late spring and early summer, before dropping off by mid- and late summer.”
- Yahoo (July 20, 2022): “When Will Flight Prices Drop? Here’s What an Expert Says.” They included an interesting quote from Jeff Klee, CEO of CheapAir.com: ““We fully expect to see flight prices start to fall in September and October, after the summer travel season is over and kids go back to school,” Klee said. “The summer travel demand has put extra stress on the entire system, so we should see prices start to level off as we get further into the autumn months.”
So there ya go. We all know that while frequent flyers and aviation geeks may look at certain niche publications and websites, Everyperson USA tends to follow the more mainstream national publications and TV shows. Most of THEM are suggesting that the crazy airline prices will start going down this fall.
We can only hope.
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