Skip to content
airtraffickonomics
Go back

Fares are higher on longer routes and where more travel is on unrestricted or high-fare ticket codes, and lower where more trips stay on one airline

US
US
Fares are higher on longer routes and where more travel is on unrestricted or high-fare ticket codes, and lower where more trips stay on one airline
Each bar links one route feature to the average fare, others held fixed, in a regression on 83,815 route-quarters (a 10% sample of 838,162) in 22,983 city pairs. R²=0.299 measures how closely it fits; these are associations, not causes
Data through 2025 Q2
airtraffickonomics.com

Each bar is how the fare moves with one route attribute when the others are held constant. Fares in this fit are also lower on busier routes and on more concentrated ones.

What this shows: The vertical axis shows Coefficient (log-linear).

Conditions and method

Status: descriptive (a pattern in the data, not a causal estimate).

The bars are in a fixed order and are not ranked by size.

The “Unrestricted-fare-basis share (F/C/D)” regressor is the share of coupons on unrestricted or high-fare fare bases, a code each carrier defines. It stands in for fare restrictions, and its positive coefficient is an association with those restrictions, not a price premium for the first cabin.

How these numbers are made

AirTraffickonomics™ · All rights reserved