Airline Pricing

Yeah. Pretty much.

I expect you probably found a sale because that was a pretty low price even two years ago for Detroit to those destinations

And you might get lucky and find one again. But overall business class fares have gone up. The fact that you were flying out of a Delta hub makes it even harder. If I want a business class fare to Europe out of Atlanta, which is also a Delta hub, I generally have to go to New York and fly from there, which means I buy one ticket to New York and then buy a business class ticket from New York to Europe and back, etc. If you do that allow lots of extra time. Delta will check your luggage though if you ask them too, but you still want to allow a lot of extra time

The number of flights between Detroit and some destinations has been reduced recently and that tends to keep the demand and prices high. Delta's monopoly on Detroit is the biggest factor.

I'm seeing wildly varying prices for multi-city trips based on the cities involved. While those prices have extreme variation they don't seem to fluctuate very much over time either. I did notice that Premium Select for Air France Detroit>Paris is often much cheaper than Delta - $1400 less!

Think of Holy Year in 2025 with expected record tourist numbers. Flight capacities for Italy were moved from other Italian destinations to / from Rome.

See also this thread about general aviation market trends.
https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/transportation/growing-passenger-load-factors-change-strategy-for-flight-boking

Another factor is airplane production not keeping up with demand.

The airlines don't have the planes they expected, so capacity is less and older planes have higher operational costs.

Not a surprise airfares are headed up.

Well, I"ve ben looking for months for flights from my non-hub/end of the line local airport to Edinburgh. I'm a Delta flyer and since last Fall prices have been around $3100-$3500 for Comfort + seats with Delta One running about $7,000. I love Delta One but just can't do that much.

I booked at $3100 and will see if they drop to ask for a credit but I'm not hopeful.

For the past year I’ve seen articles in the wall St Journal and snippets on CNBC of Delta’s CEO Ed Bastian. Usually around quarterly earnings. He’s indicated multiple times that people are paying up for premium experiences. It seems post Covid that travelers have decided to upgrade their travel and splurge on business class or premium economy. Higher demand and limited supply. Sigh. I hope the fares start to come down.

I’ve been monitoring RT from San Francisco to London. Most of the time they were in the 5K to high 5K range but recently dropped to 4.1K. So you can monitor fares and be quick to book when you see a fare that you are somewhat comfortable with. Having flexible dates can help as well. Delta has a flexible date search option for RT flights but not multi city.

I've been tracking prices for a number of Delta flights over the past few months. This is pretty anecdotal based on my searches only, but I have noticed that, while Economy Main fares seem slightly higher this year over the past couple of years, it seems as though Comfort+, Premium, and Business/First Class seats are much, much higher. A year or two ago, I could usually find Comfort+ seats for a couple hundred more than Economy; now it seems like they're as much as a thousand dollars more. Ouch, that's a lot for a tiny bit more leg room.

Maybe there's a higher demand now for those extra legroom seats, so the price is being driven up over the Economy seats? Dunno, but we're going to smoosh in the back of the plane for all of our foreseeable trips.

ETA: Ah, I was posting at the same time as Rocket. Seems like yes, those premium fares are in higher demand, thus the spike in prices.

Maybe airfares won't look so bad if one looks at inflation adjusted cost.

First trip Seattle to Florida paid $325 r/t coach. Inflation adjusted that is $1277 now.
Prem econ is now $732. "Coach" then would now be an airlines 'premium econ' today.

https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

Over the longer time frame, air travel is cheaper now, than in the past.

My attempt to find a 'silver lining'.

Sorry to comment again, but I just booked another trip for end of Sept/Oct, RT to Paris. It was about 2/3 the cost of the trip to Scotland in Comfort +. It was about $1900 for Spokane->Seattle->CDG and back the same route. Buying up to Delta One was another $4,000.

We are in San Diego, ( smaller market) and post -Covid, business class airfares have gone up to about $4000 RT. I have followed Google Flights Alerts for two years now, and there's not been much variation. Before COVID, we paid about half of that, catching the sales, out of San Diego.
My husband wants to stay loyal to British Airways.
We have adjusted to flying out of LAX, and have been getting business class airfares around $2400 RT for the past two trips ( 2024 Amsterdam and 2025 Milan.) We booked on British Airways, about 10 months out, for spring trips . We used the AARP discount and stacked it with the 10% discount using the British Airways Visa to get down to the $2400 RT price. ( This did allow us to book directly with the airlines.)
Finding these rates took a lot of time. I searched Google Flights daily for about a month. I usually found the lower rates before Google Alerts went out. We were flexible on dates and airports. For example, Milan was much cheaper than Venice for the Italy trip.
Driving to LAX is not ideal. We found that a rental car one-way (each way) was much cheaper than paying for parking at LAX.
So we compromised, as we wanted business class, and accepted a two hour drive each way. International flights are longer from the West Coast, so we wanted business class, combined with being seniors. We also did not want a US connection, so we had ten solid hours on the flight, time to eat and settle down to sleep.
We understand that this compromise isn't acceptable to others, but just wanted to share our experience.
Good luck to everyone, and to us again this summer as we plan for 2026.

I think Pat brings up a very good point. You have to be flexible. I once booked a business class flight out of Greensboro SC which is 90 minutes or so at a minimum away from where I live so not ideal, but it also was considerably cheaper than flying out of Atlanta. Of course I had to fly to Atlanta from Greensboro to catch my flight to Europe. (just in case anybody’s wondering why didn’t you just get on the plane in Atlanta. You have to go to Greensboro and catch that flight or you will not be getting on the plane in Atlanta. Delta will cancel all your other Flights).

We are also hub captives in ATL and flew out of JFK to Paris last May to save a bunch on our business class tickets. We flew Delta-booked but Air France operated flights because they were significantly cheaper than Delta metal. We needed lay flat seats due to my husband having an injury a few months prior. Check prices flying out of JFK or ORD where there is a lot more competition. Then book a separate round trip to get you home.
Like Carol's example, for our last trip to Italy, it was cheaper to book the flight from Asheville NC than ATL. I booked several months in advance. There were changes to the flight times and I contacted Delta and they actually allowed me to drop the AVL-ATL legs with no change in fare. Worked out great for us.
Flexibility is key.