Opinion: What airlines aren’t telling you about high fares

Yes, oil prices and staff shortages are playing their part. But strong profits tell another story

Straw poll: How much does it cost to fly return from Sydney to London in economy? Well, pre-COVID, the answer was often not as much as you’d think. As a long-time Pom Down Under, I would travel back every six months for a couple of weeks and rarely pay more than $1,500 out of season. That, too, would be with a premium airline – Singapore, Emirates or Etihad – flying the minimum time possible. Yet as I type this column in Honor Oak Park, South London, in late January, I do so having paid $3,250 for the same trip. I got lucky. If I’d wanted to fly at Christmas, I would have paid $8,000 one-way (really!), and most prices were around $4,000. Fares, then, have doubled. What’s going on?

Well, the industry will tell you it’s not their fault at all. Oil prices, sparked by the war in Ukraine, are soaring. For example, Qantas CEO Alan Joyce said his airline paid $5 billion in fuel last year — the biggest in his business’s history. And while prices have recently started to come down, the nature of buying fuel in advance (or ‘hedging’) means it will take time for those reductions to filter through. Secondly, airlines have decided to cut the number and frequency of flights to help better deal with staff shortages and sickness absences. In 2022, airlines suffered record delays that at one point saw a gobsmacking 45 per cent of flights across all carriers cancelled. Having staff in reserve, like a substitute teacher, means problems can be mitigated before they get out of hand. All of this, of course, costs money.