DEN-ACE
Last year I flew from Denver to Lanzarote, Canary Islands for $500. I didn’t use a travel blog, obscure search engine, or any other tricks. I was looking for a flight to Geneva, Switzerland on Google Flights, and thought — huh, it looks like I could fly there instead. I wrote the following several months ago:
Distance and Experience
Much travel writing navigates the experience of travel both obviously formed by the traveler herself, and framed by both the her experience and culture. For Europeans, the Canary Islands are a naff package-tourism destination comparable for Americans to maybe Cancun. But for Americans, the Canary Islands are a faraway windswept desert island chain off the coast of West Africa. I had a good laugh about this with some Belgians I met on the trip, who picked up on this immediately: “Oh, from America! Ha, they will all think you are cool now coming all this way!”
Then, my actual experience was defined by that distance. I didn’t lay on a beach and eat buffet food (mostly), but spent my time hiking ancient calderas and surfing. I did those things because that’s what I expected of the experience, and was not disappointed. Which reminds me that one could have an adventurous time in Cancun (or wherever), given the proper mindset. Conversely, one could have a bad time, and be grumpy, anywhere you go. In fact, finding grumpy people in beautiful places has been a strikingly consistent theme in my 20+ years of travels.
Discount Fares in an Efficient Market
It normally costs $1500 or more to fly from Denver to Lanzarote, so certainly my fare seemed like quite a discount. But how much did it really cost to fly me there? Was BA secretly making money on me? This troubled me as I sat in a sagging seat of their aging legacy 747, staring at the blank screen of the broken AV system.
Later, I found a reasonable estimate that the per-passenger jet fuel cost per mile on a 737 is about 2.7 cents. Assuming that the cost on a 747 is at least in that ballpark (I’m guessing less due to efficiency of scale), and using a mileage calculator, BA would have paid about $350 just in petrol to get me there and back (let’s not talk about carbon footprint because sad).
This makes my fare seem satisfyingly cheap, espcially since my ticket claims a fare of only $216 and taxes/fees of $340. This makes me wonder why BA (actually, American Airlines — as discussed below) offered such a low fare. I could make noises here about efficient markets, news-induced economic panics, etc., but really a better question is…
Why am I so Dumb?
When faced with such ludicrously low fares, why did I not book ten flights? Better yet, why did I not try to profit somehow — maybe through a sponsored “lifestyle” blog, or as a self-described travel pundit? I could have parried with “The Points Guy!” I could have given “The Frugal Traveler” a run for his money! Instead, I saw an obvious value/potential inefficiency and bought one flight — the end. I am dumb.
This is why, during the Great Recession, I did not go leverage-crazy and buy ten homes in Denver, letting other people do this instead. Those people are now retired and relaxing, and don’t even have to mess around with lifestyle blogging. Or maybe they’re just stressed-out dealing with first-world problems like the broken hot tub and how to look cool while over forty and rich, and actually I’m better off working. It’s all very complicated.
Why was American Airlines Selling Long Haul British Airways Flights for $400–500?
In my limited research, airline alliances work by either agreeing on the value of a specific route, and then trading “coupons,” or tickets, on the routes, or by pooling and sharing revenue on routes. Another source suggested that BA and AA do pooling. So, why was AA dumping $400 long haul routes that BA had to fulfill last November? It seems that one side — or both — got bad deals. On the other hand, the planes were far from full, so maybe they were just salvaging what they could.
The closest thing to a travel tip here is that it makes sense to look for off-season routes that nevertheless take you somewhere you want to go. For example, Europe from the U.S. in winter is off-season, but not for skiing.
But How Do Smart People Really Find Cheap Flights
It bothers me that, through my limited research, people don’t seem to have sophisticated data scraping and analysis tools for flight datastreams. Someone must have a predictive fare model for fun and profit. Yet, it appears that smart people are still relying on an army of Google Flights alerts.
Bonus travel tip:
On this trip, I actually used my hopeless Avios points and TripAdvisor to deliberately find the lamest possible tourist hotel on the island for my first night. It just seemed like a fun thing to do. When I got there, it was a dated, mostly-empty concrete monstrosity from the 80’s with rude staff. The evening entertainment was a buff dude doing wild interpretive dance to pop hits, watched by a few retirees enjoying their free fruit drink coupons. As Pitbull echoed through the atrium, I wandered through abandoned game rooms and thought, “This is awesome! This is just what I wanted!” The whole experience was exactly as advertised. In conclusion, I suggest ironic booking as a good use of TripAdvisor.
