Expect to be paying somewhere around a quarter to a third more for a long-haul economy seat than five years ago, once you strip out the pandemic-era anomaly years and compare like for like. None of that increase traces back to jet fuel, which has mostly settled into its old range. It is not a temporary spike either, in the sense that a single bad year of oil prices or a strike would explain. The rise is structural, built from several slow-moving causes stacked on top of each other, and most of the advice circulating about beating it addresses none of them, a pattern that also shows up in the fare data behind a multilingual travel reference site’s own set of interactive tools.
What Is Actually Pushing Fares Up
Start with the aircraft. Manufacturing delays at both major planemakers have kept airlines waiting years longer than planned for new narrowbody jets, and a wave of engine inspections tied to a manufacturing defect has pulled a meaningful slice of the existing fleet out of service for months at a time. Seat supply is growing slower than passenger demand, and when supply lags demand for years rather than months, the price adjusts and stays there.
Layer on rising costs that used to sit quietly inside the airline’s margin. Pilot and crew contracts renegotiated after years of understaffing cost more. Maintenance costs more, partly because the same parts shortage driving the engine inspections also raises the price of spares. Airport landing charges have climbed at a string of major hubs. In Europe specifically, environmental levies and the mandate to blend a rising percentage of sustainable aviation fuel into every tank both land directly in the ticket price, since sustainable fuel currently costs several times as much to produce as the fossil version it replaces.
Route concentration compounds it. A decade of mergers and bankruptcies has left fewer carriers holding a larger share of the busiest corridors, and less competition on a route tends to hold the price up even before any of the above factors are added. Some of these causes ease within a couple of years as new aircraft finally arrive and the parts shortage clears. Others, the levies, the mandates, the crew cost base, do not reverse. They are the new floor.
What Airlines Are Doing About It
Airlines are not absorbing these costs quietly, and the response reshapes what a ticket actually buys. Unbundling has gone further: the headline fare drops or holds steady while a bag, a seat assignment, and a carry-on allowance get priced separately, so the total a typical traveler pays rises even when the advertised number does not. Cabins are getting denser, more seats fitted into the same fuselage, which raises the number of fares an airline can sell per flight without buying a single new aircraft.
Capacity is also being reallocated rather than simply priced higher. Airlines are shifting aircraft toward routes that reliably fill and quietly thinning out or dropping service on routes that do not, which is the real reason some regional connections got worse (fewer flights, worse timing, a connection added) instead of just pricier. That thinning is also why more travelers now book two tickets on different carriers instead of one through-fare rather than trust a single airline’s own connection. Loyalty programs are moving from distance-based earning toward spend-based earning, which nudges frequent flyers toward paying more per mile rather than simply flying more miles. And dynamic pricing systems now react to a wider set of signals, and react faster, than the versions running five years ago, which is part of why a fare can visibly move within the same shopping session.
What a Traveler Can Actually Do About It
Most of the folklore aimed at this problem addresses none of the causes above, which is worth saying plainly. Browsing in incognito mode does not change the fare an airline shows you. Booking on a specific day of the week does not reliably beat any other day, and any pattern that once existed has been priced out by the same dynamic systems mentioned above. Waiting for a last-minute drop on a popular route is a bet against an airline that now has better tools than ever to avoid discounting seats it expects to sell anyway.
The levers that do something are duller and depend on flexibility rather than a trick. Being open on date and departure airport matters more than almost anything else, since it lets the search surface whichever route is currently under-filled. Booking windows genuinely differ by route type: short-haul leisure routes and long-haul routes respond to different lead times, so a rule tuned to one behaves badly applied to the other. Splitting a route across two carriers instead of booking one through-fare targets that same route-thinning pattern, since a deprioritized connection often prices lower standing alone than folded into a single itinerary, and a tool that compares splitting a route across carriers against one through-ticket tends to surface that cheaper combination before a traveler commits to either option. The same comparison matters beyond a single trip: a breakdown of what actually moves the price of a ticket separates levers with real effect sizes, including this split-ticket effect, from the ones that only feel like they work. And the least glamorous lever of all tends to be the strongest: the cheapest month to fly to a given destination is often the single biggest thing a traveler can change, bigger than any day-of-week trick or browser workaround, and it is largely a function of when demand for that specific place is lowest rather than any general rule about flying overall.
None of this reverses on its own. The aircraft delivery backlog clears eventually, and the engine inspections end once the parts shortage resolves, both probably within a few years. The crew costs, the levies, the sustainable fuel mandates, and the thinner competitive fields on major corridors do not have an expiry date. Airfares are not correcting back to where they were. They are settling at a new number, and the honest answer for a traveler is to plan around that number rather than wait it out.
About the author
Wouter van Kemenade has backpacked through Southeast and South Asia, including Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Nepal, the Philippines and Indonesia. He runs Pack Lightly, a multilingual travel reference platform.