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
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.
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