The big changes at Delta and American were met with resounding silence from budget carriers.
The common refrain was there would be no additional cuts because the new fares still didn't come close to matching the simple, discount fare structure budget airlines already had in place.
It's a predictable response. Is it true?
A few days after the changes were announced, I tried to book a roundtrip, non-refundable flight with a week's notice from Nashville to Chicago. The Delta fare (via Atlanta) came up a very reasonable $182 USD. American offered a $177 non-stop fare.
The majors face strong competition on this route from Southwest. A comparable ticket came up virtually the same price ($181). The Southwest trip is non-stop and operates through Midway rather than O'Hare.
Here we have evidence relatively short-notice non-refundable bookings on American and Delta are competitive with Southwest.
But there's still quite a difference on refundable fares. Booking the same trip with refundable tickets pushed the price to $243 on Southwest, but a whopping $884 on Delta and $973 on American.
Before you shake your finger at either major, divide those big non-refundable fares by two. You'll see each is in full compliance with the caps ($499 for Delta and $699 for American) announced in the restructuring.
In short, it is still going to cost you a great deal of money to buy refundable tickets on the major airlines.
All the standard disclaimers apply to this little exercise. It was one of many routes I could have chosen, and as with all airfares, it is merely a snapshot of a single second in time.
But it does illustrate that it is now possible to fly within a short time frame on the majors and get a decent fare.
Click "next" below and find out about so-called "walk-up" fares, where you simply show up at the airport and buy a ticket.
