Why is it so expensive to fly anywhere within the U.S. but so much cheaper to fly within and between European counties?
In: Economics
A lot of little reasons, including the average US domestic flight being somewhat longer as people are willing to drive more, but the big one is competition from trains.
The few routes where there’s competitive train service, all in the Northeastern US, US domestic flight prices are similar to those in Europe.
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One thing to keep in mind is that the U.S. requires that airport fees and taxes be included in the advertised ticket price. In Europe, in certain jurisdictions, it is possible to get quotes a <$100 ticket but then still have to pay airport use fees and taxes separately and those can be multiples of the ticket price.
[https://abcnews.go.com/Travel/airfare-expert-taxes-fees-make-cheap-europe-flights/story?id=15432210](https://abcnews.go.com/Travel/airfare-expert-taxes-fees-make-cheap-europe-flights/story?id=15432210)
Also, the U.S. is a higher income than the EU. Airports require a ton of land. The gate fees and landing slot fees for airports in the U.S. are higher than mid-sized European cities because the land that the airports sit on is more valuable.
TLDR: More competition
European domestic flights face a lot more competition than North American flights, both in the number of airlines available as well as efficient alternate means of travel like high speed trains. More competition helps drive costs down.
There’s also a lot of efficient travel options in Europe and average distances are much shorter. Depending on where you are going you can travel by car, train, or ferry in reasonable amounts of time so airlines have more competition that way as well. You can easily drive from Germany to Italy to France in a day.
Traveling by train in Europe is an efficient travel option, where-as in North America trains can be very expensive and take forever to get to your destination.
The passenger train industry in the US effectively collapsed in the 1960s because of competition from the Interstate highway system. Passenger trains still exist but they are very much a niche thing and have seen very little investment for decades. Because of the car culture in the US people are far more willing to drive long distances. The culture in the US favors the Great American Road Trip.
Geographically the US also has a very large gap in the midwest to west coast area where the population is significantly more sparse and travel by car or train takes a long time to get from destination to destination simply because of the distances involved. A train from Colorado to the West Coast takes a minimum of 30 hours but it takes 18 hours by car…
The point being that for such distances many will opt to fly because it’s a lot faster.
Short haul flights in Europe are also a lot shorter than in the US. The average distance between European cities is somewhere around half the distance compared to the US.
The US also has higher taxes and airport improvement fees etc compared to Europe.
It heavily depends on the route. Some airports have very little competition, either because they’re hubs for only one airline or because they’re very small. But many competitive routes are very cheap.
You also have to compare similar airlines. In my experience, in-Europe flights on legacy carriers like Lufthansa aren’t any cheaper than domestic on Delta in the US. But low-cost carriers like Ryanair and easyjet have become very common in Europe, driving prices down. In the US, you can fly Frontier or Spirit, frequently for like $30 as a base fare, and get a similar experience. It’s just that these airlines don’t fly as many places direct or have flights as frequently, so you’re often looking at a 14 hour overnight layover in Denver to get that cheap fare.
Europe’s train network helps here too, since you can connect a flight and a train to get to a medium size city a few hours away from a large one, where in the US you’ll need a connecting flight. The trains also lower demand on shorter routes.
Labor costs, generally speaking. Airline labor is significantly more expensive in the US than Europe or even Canada.
Before everyone gets their pitchforks and blames the greedy executives and shareholders, US airlines (with the exception of Delta) lost hundreds of million in Q12024. Airlines had record revenues but their costs went up even more.
Either labor costs need to go down or airfares need to go up. Otherwise you’ll see further consolidation in the industry.
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