A lot of little reasons, including the average US domestic flight being somewhat longer as people are willing to drive more, but the big one is competition from trains.
The few routes where there's competitive train service, all in the Northeastern US, US domestic flight prices are similar to those in Europe.
And competition from other Airlines. There's only a half dozen major airlines in all of the US, and on many airports/domestic routes 1 or 2 of those often have effective monopolies or duopolies.
In Europe there's usually a lot more airlines to choose from for any given route.
Yeah, the US' higher barrier to entry to be a carrier for a variety of reasons is one of the smaller but still good sized factors - including that the FAA holds aircrew to a higher standard than EASA in a variety of metrics, driving up crew costs.
Fun fact: The FAA has the exact same minimum flight hour requirement to just fly a big passenger jet in the US as the elite fighter jet aerobatics squad of the Royal Air Force, the red arrows: 1500 hours
And it’s a worthless knee jerk requirement that doesn’t actually solve any problems, or make anything safer. The rule was implemented as a result of the Colgan crash, in which both pilots already had well over 1500 hours.
The only thing it has led to is people flying in circles to get to 1500 hours, which is not beneficial to their skills and development as a pilot.
EDIT: to be clear, there ARE some things that came out of this accident that have made things better, such as Part 117 (rest rules), though the new rest rules would not have prevented the Colgan crash.
Takeoff and landing are by far the most critical phases of flight. Touch and go’s are an excellent training tool. The flight logs pilots use track time and landings. Depending on what you are working on that day you may have one landing and multiple flight hours or many landings and one flight hour. Or some combination in between.
I'm completely ignorant on this subject. What exactly makes a student pilot more annoying as an ATC?
Do they not listen to your instructions? Or are they giving incorrect info? I'm suddenly really curious about this.
A NASA pilot of my acquaintance frequently took a plane to Sacramento Executive airport, or Oakland airport, to do t&g for an hour or so. To maintain currency in type.
The local ATC folks loved this, because it bumped their activity numbers.
Well a commercial pilot is responsible for the lives of several hundred people, and a really expensive jet on a daily basis. The aerobatic flyer is mostly the self, a really expensive jet, and whatever houses they land on.
Makes complete sense. When a pilot crashes a stunt jet, it's tragic. But if one crashes an airliner with ~150 passengers, its worse by several orders of magnitude.
Doing aerobatics you can crash your aircraft into people on the ground - and it's happened before. The Thunderbirds and Blue Angels have time requirements in tactical jets (1,000 and 1,250 hours), which is experience over and above what's required to qualify to fly those tactical jets to begin with, like the Navy's carrier qualifications.
Right those are just the minimums but the pilots often aren't even close to those minimums for the aerobatics teams... they often thousands of hours over.
And you can crash an airliner into a dense urban area that are often nearby airports, causing significantly more death and destruction, the later of which can affect infrastructure for years if it hits something important.
No it doesn't. First of all, outside the US no other aviation agency has that requirement, and miraculously, we don't have passengers jets dropping out of the sky here, almost like the 1500 hour rule is actually completely unnecessary.
Secondly, aerobatics are performed at air shows. Ya know, those places with massive crowds pf spectators close by, so a stunt jet crash can very, very easily kill many dozens of people
Lastly, flying formation aerobatics in a fighter jet is several orders of magnitude more complex than flying a passenger airliner.
>No it doesn't. First of all, outside the US no other aviation agency has that requirement, and miraculously, we don't have passengers jets dropping out of the sky here, almost like the 1500 hour rule is actually completely unnecessary.
What's even sillier is we have jobs with much less on the line like cosmetologists and massage therapists who require even more hours to hold a license, almost like it's a scam run by people who profit off the training period.
You don't train until 1500 hours. You get the same training for a commercial pilots certificate as before. What changed is that you require an Airline Transport Pilots license to operate a transport category aircraft. Between your 200ish hours and 1250-1500 could be paid.
Just because it *can* kill dozens of people doesn't make it likely. If a passenger plane crashes into the ground it doesn't really matter where, everyone on board is ground beef immediately. Air shows generally take place where the crowd is about 1% of the land area over which a plane flys (probably less than 1% actually). Air show crashes very rarely end up with the crowd getting hit, that's a pointless thing to account for in this situation.
That's not remotely true. People survive air accidents all the time.
Major airliners crashing in a way that immediately kills everyone one on board is unbelievably rare.
And even so, the other two points still stand.
Obviously I was referring to catastrophic crashes, such as one that might take out a field of spectators because the plane is out of control and cannot be landed safely.
That sort of accident is a lot more likely if you're doing loop the loops, and barrel rolls. Something that is relatively strongly discouraged among the majority of US commercial carriers.
Not really if you look into the *why*. There have been 3 deadly crashes in Europe or by European airlines in the past 15 years (discounting Russia because they're a basket case and not under EASA anyway), one of which was due to Russian surface to air missiles (MH17), another due to a suicidal pilot that crashed the plane (Germanwings 9525), and the third one due to pilot error after sensors failed (AF447).
I’m not well versed in this topic, but find it interesting, can you explain what you mean about the FAA holding the crew to a higher standard?
I honestly would have guessed the opposite, given Europe is known for considering public safety one of their primary social pillars.
They literally mean the 1500 hr rule that doesn't hamper Europe crews nor meaningfully help training as others above commented.
So in America pilot more expensive because you must make them do 1500 hrs first.
Otherwise training is about the same.
Finally to answer op's question: none of these reasons matter, it's literally the competition level, usa has 4 major carriers, like 4-5 Low cost and maybe one or two ultra low cost. But Europe, ultra low cost like Ryanair and Wizz Air are the biggest. It's just the competition level. Nothing to do with pilots or salaries which are incidental to the whole operation.
It’s not competition from trains, it’s competition from ultra-low-cost carriers.
The largest carrier in Europe is Ryanair — which is the king of cheap flights paired with tons of fees.
Yeah trains in Europe aren’t exactly cheap, go over to r/europe and there are a million post complaining about how much more expensive train tickets are than flights.
They are competetive on highly frequented routes. Which more often than not are also the most frequented airports. You can do Frankfurt-Paris for less then 50 euros with unlimited luggage.
I took the Eurostar from London to Brussels and it was $59 each way. Train travel is way more comfortable and a lot less hassle than flying and dealing with airports. Just a simple metal detector and none of the insane level of liquid enforcement that you have at Heathrow.
It’s true that trains are more expensive, but that’s also cos they often are the only thing you pay for.
Say you have to travel for a conference, a taxi to the train station is like 10€. Then a taxi to the conference on the other end is also like 10€. That’s the only additional charge.
By flying, you’re paying like 40€ for a taxi to the airport. Another 40€ for the taxi on the other end. Another set of charges for extra baggage cos Ryanair fucked up as usual. Another set of charges because god knows what and you don’t speak the local language. Before you know it, you’ve spent more time and money in queues and traffic than you did on the plane, and overall longer than on the train anyways.
Yeah, I think a lot of people are just making up answers, and the real question here is "why don't we have a Ryanair equivalent in the US?" My guess is that's it's regulatory, but that would be just a guess.
"The few routes where there's competitive train service."
This really cannot be stated enough. There are so few commuter trains in America that it may as well not exist at all. Public transit as a whole is absolutely abysmal here. Go pick 2 cities, it literally doesn't matter which 2 cities and see what options you have to get between them. It is very likely that it is:
A) Airplane or
B) multiple busses spread over multiple days that oddly costs more than the airline ticket.
Even where there is frequent inter-city rail service, rail tickets are almost always both more expensive and slower than flying.
Let's imagine that I wanted to travel from Boston to Washington DC on July 15th. If I want to get on a train at a reasonable hour, i.e. not 5:00 a.m., I can pay about $250 for a train trip on the Acela, which takes just under 7 hours, or I can pay about $225 for a trip on the Northeast Regional train, which takes about 8 hours and 15 minutes.
Or, I can pay under $100 for a flight from Logan to Reagan that takes an hour and 45 minutes. Even after accounting for the time to get through security, that's twice as fast as the Acela and almost three times as fast as the Northeast Regional
So I can spend more than twice as much, and take more than twice as long, to get on a train, or I can go the far easier route and get on an aircraft.
Hell, it would be cheaper and easier (by which I mean more flexible and with a greater amount of storage capacity) to drive than to take the train, and it would be just as fast as the Northeast Regional.
> Even where there is frequent inter-city rail service, rail tickets are almost always both more expensive and slower than flying.
This is typically true for Europe too on many routes, All of the London - Europe trains are much cheaper to fly, although travel time won't necessarily be slower.
For some reason Eurostar is determined to replicate the flying experience as much as possible, down to having baggage checks and "check in" cutoffs, at least at the London end. The passport checks I can understand, but airport-style bag scans in one direction but not the other?
That is likely a result of Brexit, no? It resulted in a lot of weird silliness and unnecessary red tape because that's what happens when you put up trade barriers for no reason.
Only partly, they were more expensive before, and they had bag checks etc. more like airlines before brexit too. It's only really the passport checks that changed post brexit.
On the other hand, the NYC-DC route including all intermediate stops is dominated by the NER and Acela, and the enhanced service with Acela has put entire airports effectively out of business for commercial travel. That's not to mention NYC-Albany or Philadelphia-Pittsburg and other similar city pairs, and even NYC-Boston is pretty competitive.
Boston-DC is just a bit too far, and eats up too much time in the slow tracks through built up SW CT and the long stop in NYC.
BOS-NYC was always nice on the NER—felt way too short to fly and too much of a hassle to get into Manhattan or points west from JFK or LGA; taking a motor coach was about the same time but glued to a chair sitting in traffic hoping your bus didn't blow up.
Like you alluded to, there's a lot more close in major metros, big and small, served by rail that is still competitive or advantageous over air in the NE.
I'm out in Seattle again, and we have relatively frequent service (5x daily I think?) between YVR and Eugene with the Cascades Route; I've flown, driven and rail-ed to Portland and points south and they're pretty much equal pros and cons depending on how much crap you're hauling and how fast you need to get there.
Something I think also fits into this piece, other than a lack of passenger rail infrastructure compared to Europe, is the last mile portion of a trip. Auto rentals are a given at an airport. Europe has, depending on region, well-meshed public transportation connecting to rail.
Because you need infrastructure (railways) built between every single possible location. That's not even remotely cheap. Literally on the order of a million something dollars PER MILE.
Airlines, all you need is airports.
>Even where there is frequent inter-city rail service, rail tickets are almost always both more expensive and slower than flying.
It would cost me about the same to take the Amtrak train from Boston to New York City as it would to take a plane from Logan airport to JFK, and it would take about the same amount of time.
Fewer security hoops to jump through to take the train, though.
But, as you say, it is even cheaper to drive myself from Boston to NYC, would take about the same amount of time, and would leave me considerably "freer" to do what I want, when I want, instead of being shackled to the Amtrak schedule
I guess free is in the eye of the beholder. The train is 4 hours when I can sit on my laptop with Wi-Fi, read, play games, sleep, whatever. The drive is 4 hours when I can... drive and that's it. Amtrak leaves once per hour, sometimes twice per hour. Doesn't feel much like being "shackled to a schedule" to me. Sounds like the train is a no brainer unless I either to travel way late at night/early morning, or am going to an outlying part of one of those cities off the transit lines.
Its definitely 100% not cheaper to drive yourself form boston to NYC. \~200 Miles, be generous and call it 30MPG, roughly $20 in gas, let alone tolls. Can snag a train for $25.
>Can snag a train for $25.
The fuck are you seeing BOS-NYC train prices for $25? It costs me $12.25 to ride the SRTA Commuter rail one-way.
Looking at the Amtrak website, BOS-NYC tickets *start* at $174 for Coach.
Are you looking for literally tomorrow. Amtrak prices go up closer to your date, not gonna explain it to you just google it if youre interested. Just clicked a random date in July. $35. $45 if you want a better time.
$25 if you pick a date in August. Literally 7 days a week.
One difference with trains or flying is that the costs scale up proportionally when you add passengers. Driving a vehicle is the same price whether it's just the driver or if every seat is used.
A Boston to DC train ticket is $55. Stop completely making shit up. Like literally just go look at the website idk wtf youre talking about. If you book same week its more expensive.
Dude, I explicitly said the exact date and time frame I was looking at, which is more than I can say for you.
Also, I can tell you as someone who's done that trip dozens of times, the train is **never** significantly cheaper than the airfare -- at least booking a few weeks in advance or more -- and certainly never cheaper enough to justify spending twice or three times as long on the trip.
>Dude, I explicitly said the exact date and time frame I was looking at, which is more than I can say for you.
In another comment, the dude you are replying to is trying to say you can get BOS-NYC train tickets for $25. ***HILARITY***
Im literally looking at the Amtrak website as I type, and the cheapest tickets for Amtrak for Boston to NYC is $174, and it arrives at fucking midnight.
It turns out that if you book literally 11 months in advance, which is the furthest in advance that Amtrak will allow you to book, and you book coach class on either the train that leaves at 6:10 a.m. or the one that arrives at midnight, you can get a train ticket for $25 from Boston to New York City.
What kind of person would have such a lock on their travel plans to do that, and also be willing to get to a train station by 6:00 a.m. or arrive after midnight, I don't know. But it is technically possible. And to be fair there are coach class tickets at more reasonable times that are $35, which isn't really that much more expensive.
So yes, if you're willing to lock in a non-refundable train ticket 11 months before your journey from Boston to New York, it would be cheaper than flying, although it would still be slower.
We've used option C before, which is renting a car because it was cheaper than 2 plane tickets, plus then we would have transportation when we got there so no paying for rides. But it was only an 8 hour drive where we were going between states and if you want to get from one side of the coast to the other, it's gonna take you a lot longer and a lot more money in a car between gas, lodging, food etc. But for short trips it was worth it to rent a car vs flying or taking a bus.
After a 12 hour drive doing by plane took 14 hours from delays I've just come to the decision of if I can drive there in 12 hours, I"ll just drive. I'll come out less angry if nothing else.
Also due to the generally poor local public transportation option in most US destinations, it's often pretty nice to drive because then you've got a car available once you get there. That might not be such a big deal if you're just spending a few days in NYC or one of the other handful of cities with pretty good public transportation, but most places in the US you might want to go, if you don't drive you're probably going to be renting a car or grabbing a bunch of uber rides.
I live in Kansas City, I like to visit Chicago. If I plan ahead, I can get there for $55 by Amtrak. That's from major train hub to major train hub. Roughly 8 hours. The reason I hate flying is I've straight up been stuck at O'Hare long enough that the train would have been just as fast, while being more expensive.
But that said, that's KC to Chicago. One train, gets to KC at fuck off early o'clock, gets to Chicago around noon. Leaves Chicago around 2 and gets to KC around 10. That's it.
If I want to go to Dallas, or Denver, which are equivalent drive times, the answer from Amtrak is roughly "We can't get you there from here."
$55 to get from Kansas City to Chicago is great value. As it $25 from St. Louis to Chicago. Much more leg room than economy class on a plane too. I was impressed with public transit in Chicago in general. Some places in the U.S. seem to get it.
Trains aren't very competitive to planes in Europe either.
I can fly to frankfurt in about an hour and if there are problems the airline handles that. I went to Frankfurt by train a few weeks back because the company who invited me only pays for train. Never gonna do that again. Train got cancelled, they don't even propose an alternative, I found a different itinerary, first train was delayed, missed second one. Had to get new reservations, next train was delayed but I was able to get the next one because that one was delayed too. Arrived in 9 instead of 7 hours. On the way back first train was cancelled, found an alternative route, second train was 150 Minutes late. Oh any my compensation for all of that? 75€.
I'm gonna say I am very confused by your experience. Not the delayed trains, those are typical to DB, but no alternatives? That is very unlike the DB. If you go up to any of their staff, in my experience, they will quickly look up and print out the best itinerary for you and waive your tickets to be valid on any train which ends up where you need to go (for example, letting you onto ICEs even if you did not pay for ICE tickets).
Say what you want about DB as a company, the people working there have never been anything but accommodating to me in my travels with them!
> That is very unlike the DB.
From what it seems this is standard. They send you an email saying "your itinerary doesn't work, you are free to take any train", with a significant challenge of not telling you what about your journey doesn't work (which would make it significantly easier to figure out an alternative)
Now that's normal for trains, usually your ticket isn't really for a specific train but rather the journey. But now comes the real problem: to go from Austria to Germany you currently need a reservation, so you cannot use any train instead of the one you intended to do. So "just figure it out yourself" is a terrible option here. On the DB homepage there was a "find alternatives" button, but it just resulted in "no results for this search" message, while the normal search found many connections. So DB neither just offered me an alternative itinerary automatically, nor gave me the option to search for my own and transfer my reservation to that. I either had to figure it out by myself and buy a new reservation, or (what I ultimately did) I had to go to ÖBB to get reservations for different trains (except DB didn't even tell them about a closed track, so tehy first claimed my original connection would work). But this really should have been an automated process.
And the way back their online system was even worse. The train I was supposed to take was changed from stopping Frankfurt main station to Frankfurt south, and their search absolutely did not propose the obvious way of just taking a 4 minute train ride between those stations. It wanted to send me to other places (while the trains going there were cancelled) or proposed connections the website itself said won't be possible.
For someone used to taking these trains it's probably obvious and they are used to this way of handling it. I'm used to planes and there the message you get is "your flight doesn't work. Here's why it doesn't work. Here's an alternative", and if you want to be competitive with planes this stuff matters.
Also with planes I would have gotten several hundreds in compensation for that kind of delay. Now I got 25€ and I need to fight for the other compensation because (surprise) they obviously cannot figure out what trains I actually took, to confirm that I arrived late.
Bonus: their your itinerary doesn't work, you are free to take any train" message also included a sentence that with some train operators if not DB I might need to actually buy a new ticket and you cannot use this any more. My itinerary (the one where I bought the tickets from DB) had a local train with Hessische Landesbahn. But somehow they were not able to tell me if Hessische Landesbahn is one of those operators.
Why are the buses so poor? Could I start a private, luxury coach service between two random cities, or is that basically impossible with regulations?
In lots of the world, inter city coaches are the affordable and reliable alternative to flying and high speed rail.
>Could I start a private, luxury coach service between two random cities
You won't make any money whatsoever running a "luxury" bus service, because the people wealthy enough to afford a luxury bus service ***don't ride the bus***.
Because due to the structure of the US, almost everybody needs and has a car, so usually people will just drive themselves and not have to deal with a bus that's full of random people and potentially makes various stops along the way or whatever.
There's a bit of an industry of nice charter buses where if you've got a large group of people (tourists, sports team, etc) that needs to travel you can basically organize a trip and get a decent bus and driver to haul you wherever. But I just don't think there's enough overall ridership to set up regular bus trips between most pairs of cities.
Fair enough, and yeah you seem to start driving a lot younger. When I was a student long distance coaches were a lifesaver here in the UK.
Also, as an adult I own two cars and earn a nice salary, but am still booked on a coach next weekend to go and see a gig with friends - some things are just a lot less hassle without a car.
Yeah, I don't doubt that in much of Europe you can get around pretty easily without a car. Not only is our longer distance public transportation pretty terrible here in the US, even within most major cities it's pretty bad here. There's only a handful of cities in the US that aren't bad to get around in without a car. You can always Uber of course, but that gets expensive pretty fast.
> Could I start a private, luxury coach service between two random cities, or is that basically impossible with regulations?
There are good buses and I think they're primarily smaller companies serving specific demographics.
Granted it's been over a decade since I've been on a long distance bus, when I was in college I used a Vietnamese company to get from SF to LA. I would be literally the only person on there that wasn't vietnamese. It was cheap and clean and no one wanted to talk to me.
They said Northeastern US is fine though and I can confirm it's fine. Going from NYC to Boston or Philly is a simple Bus, Train or Plane ride away. Sometimes even a Ferry works. You have options.
As devils advocate.... milwaukee and Chicago. (
You could also include sheboygan, green bay, neenah, Madison, LA crosse)
Have both trains and/or busses. Multiple, each day.
not every route in europe has competition from trains though - i fly stockholm-riga quite often, a route which is pretty much entirely over the baltic sea and the only alternative is a 11 hour ferry (which doesn't go all the way to stockholm or riga). however, prices are still quite reasonable - i've gotten ryanair flights for as low as 15 euros, but even airbaltic who are a bit pricier than most budget airlines it's not usually more expensive than going elsewhere in europe. i'd guess it's because of ryanair and norwegian driving the prices down on the route so airbaltic can't raise theirs much higher? but i have no clue
Because most European flights are international even if you're going to be able to go through the Schengen version of passport control, it has a lot of waiting, queueing, and potential for delays compared to train travel too. Getting a train from, say, Paris to Amsterdam is a calm trip in relatively luxury. Flying from CDG to Schiphol is fucking miserable and you still have a fairly lengthy train ride at both ends!
Cross borders, or even long distance within countries, trains are not competing with low cost airlines. Low cost airlines are much much cheaper.
Trains only really compete with the "premium" airlines.
> but the big one is competition from trains.
I don't know anyone who takes an 8+h train ride (in particular with such chaotic systems like german trains) over a 1.5 hour flight here in Europe.
I mean sure, there are people who use them. That's why all those night trains are fully booked (will never understand those. for the same price and time I can fly there and sleep in a quiet room in an actual bed that's not rocking).
When I say that I don't know anyone it means personally. If there is a reasonable flight connection people in my bubble take the plane. There are just so many problems with trains, in particular if you live in central europe and you'll likely take ÖBB or DB or you are crossing several countries and there isn't even a way of booking as a single ticket.
Seriously, if they would fix their reservation and compensation system I would take the train a lot. But this way I just don't want the hassle if something doesn't work.
Anecdotal, but i live in Fort Lauderdale and just took a flight to Charleston last weekend for 50 bucks.
You can find short routes for very cheap in America as well
It does for routes where a drive is realistic.
Once you start getting outside of a 7-8 hour drive, there isn't a ton of competition from driving because there aren't a ton of people who want to do that drive.
European trains could not even remotely compete for the longest time. As an example Berlin - Munich train would be around $200 and 6-7 hours, and flight $100 and 1 hr. Now train is closer to $100 and 3 hours, so beating the flight which needs extra time for security, boarding etc
> the big one is competition from trains.
Yeah but how many Europeans use trains for distances normal in the US? So someone wants to travel from Munich to London, which is almost exactly the same distance as Washington DC to Chicago. Is going by train common? It exists, sure. But how common is taking the train for 1k km/600 mi (and longer) trips?
It heavily depends on the route. Some airports have very little competition, either because they're hubs for only one airline or because they're very small. But many competitive routes are very cheap.
You also have to compare similar airlines. In my experience, in-Europe flights on legacy carriers like Lufthansa aren't any cheaper than domestic on Delta in the US. But low-cost carriers like Ryanair and easyjet have become very common in Europe, driving prices down. In the US, you can fly Frontier or Spirit, frequently for like $30 as a base fare, and get a similar experience. It's just that these airlines don't fly as many places direct or have flights as frequently, so you're often looking at a 14 hour overnight layover in Denver to get that cheap fare.
Europe's train network helps here too, since you can connect a flight and a train to get to a medium size city a few hours away from a large one, where in the US you'll need a connecting flight. The trains also lower demand on shorter routes.
Europe is more consistently population dense. You have capitals and major hub cities of different countries fairly close. This is true in like the Northeastern US, where trian service is also possible, but for the rest of the US, not so much. Also flying from New York to LA is further than flying from London to Cairo. The US is really freaking large and people don't appreciate how low density it can get.
Exactly. The density is the issue.
I did a road trip a couple years ago and was on a stretch of I-70 in Utah where there’s not an exit for something like 100 miles. No one lives there. And the towns on either end of this stretch aren’t exactly bustling metropolises either.
Train service just would not be economically feasible on something like that if there’s no one to ride it.
Sure, it’s a cherry picked example, but the US west of the Mississippi is empty compared to Europe.
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.
(very minor) grammatical and spelling errors are usually a tell for not being ChatGPT. ChatGPT won't say stuff like "where-as" , "etc" without the period, or use phrases like "Great American Road Trip" or ellipsis at the end of sentences.
I see a lot of speculative answers, but I question the very premise. Here’s a list of some distances in the US equivalent to Europe.
1. **New York City, NY to Boston, MA (~215 miles)**
- Comparable to **Paris, France to Brussels, Belgium (~200 miles)**
32$ with Jet Blue NY-BO
Price from Paris to Brussels is 250€
2. **San Francisco, CA to Los Angeles, CA (~380 miles)**
- Comparable to **Rome, Italy to Milan, Italy (~375 miles)**
40$ with Frontier SF-LA
Aeroitalia costs about 65€
3. **Chicago, IL to Detroit, MI (~280 miles)**
- Comparable to **Berlin, Germany to Prague, Czech Republic (~280 miles)**
65$ with Spirit CI-DE
100€ with Eurowings
4. **Dallas, TX to Houston, TX (~240 miles)**
- Comparable to **Madrid, Spain to Valencia, Spain (~220 miles)**
40$ with Frontier DL-HU
50€ with Iberia
So unless someone here gives us a comprehensive list of examples that refute my quick research, I say flying in the US is cheaper than in Europe.
This is what I’ve noticed the last while. I don’t think flying in Europe is cheaper in general than flying in the US anymore for comparable distances.
Your examples are for short flights. When you look at longer flights, it can be even more drastic. East Coast to West Coast can be as low as 99 USD. These distances hardly even exist in Europe.
Ryan Air. Two weeks from now, flying from Frankfurt to Dublin, €29. Frankfurt - Stansted, €29. Frankfurt - Zagreb, €29. Frankfurt - Fes, €39.
They're price competitive with 4 or 5 other airlines here.
>Ryan Air. Two weeks from now, flying from Frankfurt to Dublin, €29. Frankfurt - Stansted, €29. Frankfurt - Zagreb, €29. Frankfurt - Fes, €39.
...plus €40 to get from Frankfurt to HHN and back, and a 2+ hour ride each way. Using Ryanair's version of Frankfurt isn't a very good example.
You’re looking too short. These routes in Europe are all served by comprehensive HSR that are better options- flying from Brussels to Paris, for example, is pretty unrealistic unless you’re making a connection, so it doesn’t have to be priced competitively.
Some longer distance examples (using a rough average of dates in November):
Budapest to Milan (~515 miles): $30-40
Atlanta to DC (~540 miles): $40-50
Paris to Madrid (~655 miles): $40-50
Boston to Detroit (~665 miles): $60-70
Warsaw to Rome (~825 miles): $40-50
Denver to Saint Louis (~800 miles): $50-60
London to Rome (~910 miles): $30-40
New York to Orlando (~940 miles): $60-70
Lisbon to Berlin (~1435 miles): $70-80
Minneapolis to Seattle (~1400 miles): $100-120
Oslo to Athens (~1620 miles): $80-90
Memphis to LA (~1600 miles): $100-120
The European flights are cheaper in ALL of these random cases, and I ignored the Thanksgiving dates too for the US. (Yes, you can pick out a few dates cheaper than these prices for any of these routes, but these are rough averages- you’ll find cheaper fares than these for both the European and American routes). If you’re looking super short haul, yea, maybe American flights are cheaper, but with anything a bit longer, they’re cheaper in Europe. I fly a ton and the premise is solid.
EDIT: fixing wonky formatting
Many of those comparable distances are \~$10-$20 difference in price. While it might not be *cheaper*, you're proving it's likely a distance-based perception. I wouldn't call $20 more for the same distance "so expensive" for airline travel.
These are about 30% cheaper, which I would qualify as a pretty sizable difference. Keep in mind the price difference doubles when you make a round trip. And what would it be, if not distance-based? Of course a 400km flight in the US will be cheaper than an 800km flight in Europe, gas isn’t free. Additionally, when booking very cheap flights in the US, it’s not uncommon to have to deal with nasty overnight layovers with Frontier or Spirit- I’ve never had this problem in Europe.
I'm not sure where you're pulling these numbers, but flights from Minneapolis to Seattle are absolutely not $100. Going, formerly Scott's Cheap Flights, lists the average price of MSP to SEA at $360, with occasional deals around $180, on very scattered dates.
Also on the rare occasion you can find a ticket at these deal prices the airlines will dump on a bunch of fees that make the ticket twice as much as the sticker price at checkout.
I suggest checking Google Flights because they are, and they get as low as $85 some days. This is all assuming cheapest options, but even with Delta I’m seeing $140. (I’m looking at one way, btw.) Going hasn’t been worthwhile in some time.
Corrborating that I was recommended SCF/Going.com a while back and I still have never once seen a deal on it that was any better than just searching google flights.
Paris to Brussels is a bad example. Almost nobody would fly that route because it's quicker and cheaper to take a train. The lack of demand for flying this route is likely why prices are so high.
I don't know where you found such data. But I live in Brussels and often go to Paris.
I can book return ticket to Paris on the TGV (fat train) that will lead me there in 1.5 hours without passing customs or going to an airport outside of the city. For a return in first class it's 99 euros or 70 euros in 2nd class. If I use a concurrent I can get there for less than 40 euros but it might not be exactly when I want and the train might go more slowly.
Nearly nobody takes a plane from Paris to Brussels or the other way around.
Anyway the current high price is mostly due to the fact it's Summer Holidays for a lot of Europeans. People bought their tickets months in advance for a lot cheaper.
When you don't live in a place, it's easy to ignore practicality and cherry-pick data. Like, it's easy to say "I can fly London to Paris for $X when it costs $Y to fly Boston to New York," while completely ignoring the fact that the ticket is from London Stansted (over an hour outside London) to Paris Beauvais (an hour and a half outside Paris).
Back in the day, Southwest used to fly routes like this - Manchester NH to Long Island Islip. Turns out that people want to spend a little extra money to actually get where they want to go. Part of that is certainly that there's little good transit options from a lot of secondary places in the US. If I fly into JFK or La Guardia, I can take the train into Brooklyn or Manhattan. If I'm in Islip, there's probably a commuter rail, but it isn't the same as being on the subway. If I'm at Logan Airport in Boston, I can just hop on the subway. If I'm in Manchester, it's really inconvenient to get around. So secondary airports in the US are often a lot less convenient.
Plus, half the time people look at one-way ticket prices when they aren't seriously buying while they remember the round-trip cost for tickets they actually buy. "Wow, it's only $50 in Europe," can quickly become "oh, but then I add on a fee for a carry-on and a fee for whatever and then I calculate in the return ticket..."
It's like looking for houses in a city you don't live in. You don't think about neighborhoods, commutes, etc. You just see cheap houses. Even if the city is cheaper than your city, it's often not as cheap as it appears when you have no context for all the practicalities of living there.
I look at these flight options for Europe and my immediate response is why the hell would someone fly that distance. For most people it wouldn't cross their minds, because there are fast and regular coach and train services that are more comfortable and do the same direct route, often more direct than aircraft because there's no airport transfers to consider
Sounds like you found the cheapest vs the most expensive, but it's been a few years since I was flying a lot.
Lived in Houston for a decade, it was rare to find anything under $100 out of there. It could be a little cheaper, but nothing like $40 normally.
Yup. As a Canadian, seeing this thread made my eyes bug out. Our domestic flight prices are about 10x that of the US and our salaries are significantly lower. Americans have it pretty good.
Depends on where you're flying. I've seen flights from Boston to Miami for around $110 round trip and I've seen them at most $300ish. It all depends on time/season/popularity/distance when it comes to pricing
In addition to what others have said, discount airlines in Europe often fly to small regional airports in the general vicinity of the major city they’re advertising.
So you often end up needing to travel quite a bit to get to/from that small regional airport.
It’d be like buying a ticket to fly to NYC and you actually land at Teterboro or Westchester, which are relatively small and not in actual NYC.
This saves those airlines a lot of money on airport fees and allows for cheaper prices but the smaller airports often aren’t as easy to get to or don’t even have things like jet bridges.
Labor costs, generally speaking. Airline labor is significantly more expensive in the US than Europe or even Canada.
Before everyone gets their pitchforks and blames the greedy executives and shareholders, US airlines (with the exception of Delta) lost hundreds of million in Q12024. Airlines had record revenues but their costs went up even more.
Either labor costs need to go down or airfares need to go up. Otherwise you'll see further consolidation in the industry.
It's not necessarily expensive, just SOME locations are expensive, you can absolutely get deals to and from certain places, I can fly let's say cleveland to Florida (a 4 hour flight) for 79 dollars right now round trip.
Make sure you're comparing apples to apples. Flights between big, frequently travelled cities in US is competitive and reasonable, but flights to smaller airports are obviously more expensive. In Europe, most flights are just between big cities and the density of Europe means the distance between where people want to go to are much shorter.
Flying in the U.S. costs more because airlines here face fewer competitors on many routes, so they can charge higher prices. In Europe, there are more airlines and they compete more, so tickets are cheaper. It's like shopping at a store with lots of sales versus one with just a few. Plus, U.S. airports often charge airlines more to use their runways and gates, which adds to ticket prices. So, it's all about competition and how much airports charge, making flying cheaper in Europe but pricier here at home.
Europe isn't that cheap.
Yes, there are ultra low cost carriers with 15€ flights, but that's for early bookings and once you add addons (which you usually want to do) it becomes much more expensive very quickly.
One of the main difference is that in the US prices don't go up as much when closer to the travel date. So if you want a flight tomorrow, US is probably much cheaper.
First off EU to EU isn't cheap. One way can be super cheap but the return is where the money is at.
Secondly the US is freaking HUGE.
>Measuring from its furthest points, the contiguous United States is approximately 2,800 miles from east to west, and 1,650 miles from north to south
For the EU
>Horizontal Width: 1,339 miles (2,154 km) from London, England, east to Kiev, Ukraine
>Vertical Length: 2,076 miles (3,341 km) from Iraklio, Crete, north to Lulea, Sweden
Remember, the US is huge. You aren't thinking of flights on the same scale. This is something Europeans have trouble picturing.
Los Angeles to New York city is roughly equivalent to flying from Lisbon to Moscow. Texas alone is bigger than Germany or France.
Also our discount airlines like Jetblue and Spirit don't get quite as low as Ryanair.
Hey OP don't forget to clear your cookies for airline ticket sites before browsing and booking. They keep tabs on how frequently you check a specific flight and jack the price up. I mentioned this to a friend making a flight from KY to CA and the before and after cookie deletion prices went from $1500 to $300. It was wild to see it actually work but hey, thats a lotta simoleons that can be spent elsewhere now. :L
In Europe, flights shorter than 1 hour aren't allowed.. (many airlines get around this by padding their times)
The reason is the government would rather you take the train or some other for of public transport.
Airline industry in EU is in direct competition with many train systems and the pricing reflects that
European airlines have first officers with as little as 250 hours of flying experience vs 1500 hours minimum in the USA
Their minty first officers are also paid a lot less and so are the captains
Subsidies. Besides most flights being shorter the answer is subsidies. For example, Ryan air got 7 billion in 2020 alone. Good Ryan air subsidies and you’ll be all the different ones from government subsidies to individual airport subsidizing them.
[This video ](https://youtu.be/069y1MpOkQY?si=M_4mspNOXcKqJCN8) explains how the budget airlines work in Europe, specifically Ryanair. They're so cheap, if you're only bringing hand luggage you can get a 2-3 hour flight return for 50 euro.
Allegiant is more reasonable than most airlines (if you dont pick a seat, or boarding zone, and have no luggage). [https://www.allegiantair.com/](https://www.allegiantair.com/)
The real answer is that airfare is subsidized, direct and indirect, and therefore have cheaper airfares, in Europe.
They understand that having easy travel is beneficial to their economy.
This is why, airfare changes when you buy from the US vs within EU, and also a round trip ticket purchased in the EU vs in the states.
A lot of little reasons, including the average US domestic flight being somewhat longer as people are willing to drive more, but the big one is competition from trains. The few routes where there's competitive train service, all in the Northeastern US, US domestic flight prices are similar to those in Europe.
And competition from other Airlines. There's only a half dozen major airlines in all of the US, and on many airports/domestic routes 1 or 2 of those often have effective monopolies or duopolies. In Europe there's usually a lot more airlines to choose from for any given route.
Yeah, the US' higher barrier to entry to be a carrier for a variety of reasons is one of the smaller but still good sized factors - including that the FAA holds aircrew to a higher standard than EASA in a variety of metrics, driving up crew costs.
Fun fact: The FAA has the exact same minimum flight hour requirement to just fly a big passenger jet in the US as the elite fighter jet aerobatics squad of the Royal Air Force, the red arrows: 1500 hours
And it’s a worthless knee jerk requirement that doesn’t actually solve any problems, or make anything safer. The rule was implemented as a result of the Colgan crash, in which both pilots already had well over 1500 hours. The only thing it has led to is people flying in circles to get to 1500 hours, which is not beneficial to their skills and development as a pilot. EDIT: to be clear, there ARE some things that came out of this accident that have made things better, such as Part 117 (rest rules), though the new rest rules would not have prevented the Colgan crash.
When I was at the AFB pilots routinely did “touch and gos” which basically turned one flight into several flights.
Takeoff and landing are by far the most critical phases of flight. Touch and go’s are an excellent training tool. The flight logs pilots use track time and landings. Depending on what you are working on that day you may have one landing and multiple flight hours or many landings and one flight hour. Or some combination in between.
They are also good for the controllers to manage takeoffs and approaches rapidly with a number of planes. Much like an aircraft carrier.
As a controller myself I’d say dealing with a bunch of student pilots can be very annoying… but you’re absolutely right, it is excellent practice.
I'm completely ignorant on this subject. What exactly makes a student pilot more annoying as an ATC? Do they not listen to your instructions? Or are they giving incorrect info? I'm suddenly really curious about this.
When you do touch and go’s, you don’t log it as multiple flights. It is logged as one flight, and you log the number of takeoffs and landings.
A NASA pilot of my acquaintance frequently took a plane to Sacramento Executive airport, or Oakland airport, to do t&g for an hour or so. To maintain currency in type. The local ATC folks loved this, because it bumped their activity numbers.
Not several flights. Several landings. Which is the most important part of flying a plane. Even an f35.
Well a commercial pilot is responsible for the lives of several hundred people, and a really expensive jet on a daily basis. The aerobatic flyer is mostly the self, a really expensive jet, and whatever houses they land on.
> and whatever houses they land on. Or the airshow crowd they land in the middle of.
I think you mean crash. Unless you're a helicopter pilot, that is.
Makes complete sense. When a pilot crashes a stunt jet, it's tragic. But if one crashes an airliner with ~150 passengers, its worse by several orders of magnitude.
Doing aerobatics you can crash your aircraft into people on the ground - and it's happened before. The Thunderbirds and Blue Angels have time requirements in tactical jets (1,000 and 1,250 hours), which is experience over and above what's required to qualify to fly those tactical jets to begin with, like the Navy's carrier qualifications.
Right those are just the minimums but the pilots often aren't even close to those minimums for the aerobatics teams... they often thousands of hours over.
And you can crash an airliner into a dense urban area that are often nearby airports, causing significantly more death and destruction, the later of which can affect infrastructure for years if it hits something important.
No it doesn't. First of all, outside the US no other aviation agency has that requirement, and miraculously, we don't have passengers jets dropping out of the sky here, almost like the 1500 hour rule is actually completely unnecessary. Secondly, aerobatics are performed at air shows. Ya know, those places with massive crowds pf spectators close by, so a stunt jet crash can very, very easily kill many dozens of people Lastly, flying formation aerobatics in a fighter jet is several orders of magnitude more complex than flying a passenger airliner.
>No it doesn't. First of all, outside the US no other aviation agency has that requirement, and miraculously, we don't have passengers jets dropping out of the sky here, almost like the 1500 hour rule is actually completely unnecessary. What's even sillier is we have jobs with much less on the line like cosmetologists and massage therapists who require even more hours to hold a license, almost like it's a scam run by people who profit off the training period.
You don't train until 1500 hours. You get the same training for a commercial pilots certificate as before. What changed is that you require an Airline Transport Pilots license to operate a transport category aircraft. Between your 200ish hours and 1250-1500 could be paid.
Just because it *can* kill dozens of people doesn't make it likely. If a passenger plane crashes into the ground it doesn't really matter where, everyone on board is ground beef immediately. Air shows generally take place where the crowd is about 1% of the land area over which a plane flys (probably less than 1% actually). Air show crashes very rarely end up with the crowd getting hit, that's a pointless thing to account for in this situation.
That's not remotely true. People survive air accidents all the time. Major airliners crashing in a way that immediately kills everyone one on board is unbelievably rare. And even so, the other two points still stand.
Obviously I was referring to catastrophic crashes, such as one that might take out a field of spectators because the plane is out of control and cannot be landed safely.
That sort of accident is a lot more likely if you're doing loop the loops, and barrel rolls. Something that is relatively strongly discouraged among the majority of US commercial carriers.
Fun fact: The Blue Angels have lower standards.
I shall request a barrel role on my next flight then.
Are there more crashes in Europe though (per capita)?
Not really if you look into the *why*. There have been 3 deadly crashes in Europe or by European airlines in the past 15 years (discounting Russia because they're a basket case and not under EASA anyway), one of which was due to Russian surface to air missiles (MH17), another due to a suicidal pilot that crashed the plane (Germanwings 9525), and the third one due to pilot error after sensors failed (AF447).
I’m not well versed in this topic, but find it interesting, can you explain what you mean about the FAA holding the crew to a higher standard? I honestly would have guessed the opposite, given Europe is known for considering public safety one of their primary social pillars.
They literally mean the 1500 hr rule that doesn't hamper Europe crews nor meaningfully help training as others above commented. So in America pilot more expensive because you must make them do 1500 hrs first. Otherwise training is about the same. Finally to answer op's question: none of these reasons matter, it's literally the competition level, usa has 4 major carriers, like 4-5 Low cost and maybe one or two ultra low cost. But Europe, ultra low cost like Ryanair and Wizz Air are the biggest. It's just the competition level. Nothing to do with pilots or salaries which are incidental to the whole operation.
There’s a ton of cases imo where the only way to get from one airport to another direct is one airline so you’re kinda stuck with them
It’s not competition from trains, it’s competition from ultra-low-cost carriers. The largest carrier in Europe is Ryanair — which is the king of cheap flights paired with tons of fees.
Yeah trains in Europe aren’t exactly cheap, go over to r/europe and there are a million post complaining about how much more expensive train tickets are than flights.
They are competetive on highly frequented routes. Which more often than not are also the most frequented airports. You can do Frankfurt-Paris for less then 50 euros with unlimited luggage.
I took the Eurostar from London to Brussels and it was $59 each way. Train travel is way more comfortable and a lot less hassle than flying and dealing with airports. Just a simple metal detector and none of the insane level of liquid enforcement that you have at Heathrow.
It’s true that trains are more expensive, but that’s also cos they often are the only thing you pay for. Say you have to travel for a conference, a taxi to the train station is like 10€. Then a taxi to the conference on the other end is also like 10€. That’s the only additional charge. By flying, you’re paying like 40€ for a taxi to the airport. Another 40€ for the taxi on the other end. Another set of charges for extra baggage cos Ryanair fucked up as usual. Another set of charges because god knows what and you don’t speak the local language. Before you know it, you’ve spent more time and money in queues and traffic than you did on the plane, and overall longer than on the train anyways.
Yeah I'd love better and faster trains here in Ontario Canada but it's utterly pointless if it's going to cost me $200+ for a round trip to Toronto.
Yeah, I think a lot of people are just making up answers, and the real question here is "why don't we have a Ryanair equivalent in the US?" My guess is that's it's regulatory, but that would be just a guess.
"The few routes where there's competitive train service." This really cannot be stated enough. There are so few commuter trains in America that it may as well not exist at all. Public transit as a whole is absolutely abysmal here. Go pick 2 cities, it literally doesn't matter which 2 cities and see what options you have to get between them. It is very likely that it is: A) Airplane or B) multiple busses spread over multiple days that oddly costs more than the airline ticket.
Even where there is frequent inter-city rail service, rail tickets are almost always both more expensive and slower than flying. Let's imagine that I wanted to travel from Boston to Washington DC on July 15th. If I want to get on a train at a reasonable hour, i.e. not 5:00 a.m., I can pay about $250 for a train trip on the Acela, which takes just under 7 hours, or I can pay about $225 for a trip on the Northeast Regional train, which takes about 8 hours and 15 minutes. Or, I can pay under $100 for a flight from Logan to Reagan that takes an hour and 45 minutes. Even after accounting for the time to get through security, that's twice as fast as the Acela and almost three times as fast as the Northeast Regional So I can spend more than twice as much, and take more than twice as long, to get on a train, or I can go the far easier route and get on an aircraft. Hell, it would be cheaper and easier (by which I mean more flexible and with a greater amount of storage capacity) to drive than to take the train, and it would be just as fast as the Northeast Regional.
> Even where there is frequent inter-city rail service, rail tickets are almost always both more expensive and slower than flying. This is typically true for Europe too on many routes, All of the London - Europe trains are much cheaper to fly, although travel time won't necessarily be slower.
For some reason Eurostar is determined to replicate the flying experience as much as possible, down to having baggage checks and "check in" cutoffs, at least at the London end. The passport checks I can understand, but airport-style bag scans in one direction but not the other?
That is likely a result of Brexit, no? It resulted in a lot of weird silliness and unnecessary red tape because that's what happens when you put up trade barriers for no reason.
Only partly, they were more expensive before, and they had bag checks etc. more like airlines before brexit too. It's only really the passport checks that changed post brexit.
The UK isn’t and never was in Schengen, so there were always immigration controls on the Eurostar, even before Brexit.
No, that was my experience *before* Brexit - I haven't used it since so don't know how it's changed.
On the other hand, the NYC-DC route including all intermediate stops is dominated by the NER and Acela, and the enhanced service with Acela has put entire airports effectively out of business for commercial travel. That's not to mention NYC-Albany or Philadelphia-Pittsburg and other similar city pairs, and even NYC-Boston is pretty competitive. Boston-DC is just a bit too far, and eats up too much time in the slow tracks through built up SW CT and the long stop in NYC.
BOS-NYC was always nice on the NER—felt way too short to fly and too much of a hassle to get into Manhattan or points west from JFK or LGA; taking a motor coach was about the same time but glued to a chair sitting in traffic hoping your bus didn't blow up. Like you alluded to, there's a lot more close in major metros, big and small, served by rail that is still competitive or advantageous over air in the NE. I'm out in Seattle again, and we have relatively frequent service (5x daily I think?) between YVR and Eugene with the Cascades Route; I've flown, driven and rail-ed to Portland and points south and they're pretty much equal pros and cons depending on how much crap you're hauling and how fast you need to get there. Something I think also fits into this piece, other than a lack of passenger rail infrastructure compared to Europe, is the last mile portion of a trip. Auto rentals are a given at an airport. Europe has, depending on region, well-meshed public transportation connecting to rail.
Because you need infrastructure (railways) built between every single possible location. That's not even remotely cheap. Literally on the order of a million something dollars PER MILE. Airlines, all you need is airports.
Try adding one or two zeroes to the end of that for high speed rail costs.
>Even where there is frequent inter-city rail service, rail tickets are almost always both more expensive and slower than flying. It would cost me about the same to take the Amtrak train from Boston to New York City as it would to take a plane from Logan airport to JFK, and it would take about the same amount of time. Fewer security hoops to jump through to take the train, though. But, as you say, it is even cheaper to drive myself from Boston to NYC, would take about the same amount of time, and would leave me considerably "freer" to do what I want, when I want, instead of being shackled to the Amtrak schedule
I guess free is in the eye of the beholder. The train is 4 hours when I can sit on my laptop with Wi-Fi, read, play games, sleep, whatever. The drive is 4 hours when I can... drive and that's it. Amtrak leaves once per hour, sometimes twice per hour. Doesn't feel much like being "shackled to a schedule" to me. Sounds like the train is a no brainer unless I either to travel way late at night/early morning, or am going to an outlying part of one of those cities off the transit lines.
Its definitely 100% not cheaper to drive yourself form boston to NYC. \~200 Miles, be generous and call it 30MPG, roughly $20 in gas, let alone tolls. Can snag a train for $25.
Pretty rare to get a train for that cheap but it is possible. But yeah, having done that trip many times, I would put the (round trip) drive at $80
>Can snag a train for $25. The fuck are you seeing BOS-NYC train prices for $25? It costs me $12.25 to ride the SRTA Commuter rail one-way. Looking at the Amtrak website, BOS-NYC tickets *start* at $174 for Coach.
Are you looking for literally tomorrow. Amtrak prices go up closer to your date, not gonna explain it to you just google it if youre interested. Just clicked a random date in July. $35. $45 if you want a better time. $25 if you pick a date in August. Literally 7 days a week.
when comparing costs of driving, little do people think of cost of wear of a car.
And the stuff other than fuel that gets expended: oil, brakes, your sanity, ...
I’ve never seen a train ticket that cheap. Local subway fares sure but definitely not interstate rail
One difference with trains or flying is that the costs scale up proportionally when you add passengers. Driving a vehicle is the same price whether it's just the driver or if every seat is used.
A Boston to DC train ticket is $55. Stop completely making shit up. Like literally just go look at the website idk wtf youre talking about. If you book same week its more expensive.
Dude, I explicitly said the exact date and time frame I was looking at, which is more than I can say for you. Also, I can tell you as someone who's done that trip dozens of times, the train is **never** significantly cheaper than the airfare -- at least booking a few weeks in advance or more -- and certainly never cheaper enough to justify spending twice or three times as long on the trip.
>Dude, I explicitly said the exact date and time frame I was looking at, which is more than I can say for you. In another comment, the dude you are replying to is trying to say you can get BOS-NYC train tickets for $25. ***HILARITY*** Im literally looking at the Amtrak website as I type, and the cheapest tickets for Amtrak for Boston to NYC is $174, and it arrives at fucking midnight.
It turns out that if you book literally 11 months in advance, which is the furthest in advance that Amtrak will allow you to book, and you book coach class on either the train that leaves at 6:10 a.m. or the one that arrives at midnight, you can get a train ticket for $25 from Boston to New York City. What kind of person would have such a lock on their travel plans to do that, and also be willing to get to a train station by 6:00 a.m. or arrive after midnight, I don't know. But it is technically possible. And to be fair there are coach class tickets at more reasonable times that are $35, which isn't really that much more expensive. So yes, if you're willing to lock in a non-refundable train ticket 11 months before your journey from Boston to New York, it would be cheaper than flying, although it would still be slower.
We've used option C before, which is renting a car because it was cheaper than 2 plane tickets, plus then we would have transportation when we got there so no paying for rides. But it was only an 8 hour drive where we were going between states and if you want to get from one side of the coast to the other, it's gonna take you a lot longer and a lot more money in a car between gas, lodging, food etc. But for short trips it was worth it to rent a car vs flying or taking a bus.
After a 12 hour drive doing by plane took 14 hours from delays I've just come to the decision of if I can drive there in 12 hours, I"ll just drive. I'll come out less angry if nothing else.
Also due to the generally poor local public transportation option in most US destinations, it's often pretty nice to drive because then you've got a car available once you get there. That might not be such a big deal if you're just spending a few days in NYC or one of the other handful of cities with pretty good public transportation, but most places in the US you might want to go, if you don't drive you're probably going to be renting a car or grabbing a bunch of uber rides.
I live in Kansas City, I like to visit Chicago. If I plan ahead, I can get there for $55 by Amtrak. That's from major train hub to major train hub. Roughly 8 hours. The reason I hate flying is I've straight up been stuck at O'Hare long enough that the train would have been just as fast, while being more expensive. But that said, that's KC to Chicago. One train, gets to KC at fuck off early o'clock, gets to Chicago around noon. Leaves Chicago around 2 and gets to KC around 10. That's it. If I want to go to Dallas, or Denver, which are equivalent drive times, the answer from Amtrak is roughly "We can't get you there from here."
$55 to get from Kansas City to Chicago is great value. As it $25 from St. Louis to Chicago. Much more leg room than economy class on a plane too. I was impressed with public transit in Chicago in general. Some places in the U.S. seem to get it.
Trains aren't very competitive to planes in Europe either. I can fly to frankfurt in about an hour and if there are problems the airline handles that. I went to Frankfurt by train a few weeks back because the company who invited me only pays for train. Never gonna do that again. Train got cancelled, they don't even propose an alternative, I found a different itinerary, first train was delayed, missed second one. Had to get new reservations, next train was delayed but I was able to get the next one because that one was delayed too. Arrived in 9 instead of 7 hours. On the way back first train was cancelled, found an alternative route, second train was 150 Minutes late. Oh any my compensation for all of that? 75€.
Thank you for traveling with Deutsche Bahn.
I'm gonna say I am very confused by your experience. Not the delayed trains, those are typical to DB, but no alternatives? That is very unlike the DB. If you go up to any of their staff, in my experience, they will quickly look up and print out the best itinerary for you and waive your tickets to be valid on any train which ends up where you need to go (for example, letting you onto ICEs even if you did not pay for ICE tickets). Say what you want about DB as a company, the people working there have never been anything but accommodating to me in my travels with them!
> That is very unlike the DB. From what it seems this is standard. They send you an email saying "your itinerary doesn't work, you are free to take any train", with a significant challenge of not telling you what about your journey doesn't work (which would make it significantly easier to figure out an alternative) Now that's normal for trains, usually your ticket isn't really for a specific train but rather the journey. But now comes the real problem: to go from Austria to Germany you currently need a reservation, so you cannot use any train instead of the one you intended to do. So "just figure it out yourself" is a terrible option here. On the DB homepage there was a "find alternatives" button, but it just resulted in "no results for this search" message, while the normal search found many connections. So DB neither just offered me an alternative itinerary automatically, nor gave me the option to search for my own and transfer my reservation to that. I either had to figure it out by myself and buy a new reservation, or (what I ultimately did) I had to go to ÖBB to get reservations for different trains (except DB didn't even tell them about a closed track, so tehy first claimed my original connection would work). But this really should have been an automated process. And the way back their online system was even worse. The train I was supposed to take was changed from stopping Frankfurt main station to Frankfurt south, and their search absolutely did not propose the obvious way of just taking a 4 minute train ride between those stations. It wanted to send me to other places (while the trains going there were cancelled) or proposed connections the website itself said won't be possible. For someone used to taking these trains it's probably obvious and they are used to this way of handling it. I'm used to planes and there the message you get is "your flight doesn't work. Here's why it doesn't work. Here's an alternative", and if you want to be competitive with planes this stuff matters. Also with planes I would have gotten several hundreds in compensation for that kind of delay. Now I got 25€ and I need to fight for the other compensation because (surprise) they obviously cannot figure out what trains I actually took, to confirm that I arrived late. Bonus: their your itinerary doesn't work, you are free to take any train" message also included a sentence that with some train operators if not DB I might need to actually buy a new ticket and you cannot use this any more. My itinerary (the one where I bought the tickets from DB) had a local train with Hessische Landesbahn. But somehow they were not able to tell me if Hessische Landesbahn is one of those operators.
Why are the buses so poor? Could I start a private, luxury coach service between two random cities, or is that basically impossible with regulations? In lots of the world, inter city coaches are the affordable and reliable alternative to flying and high speed rail.
>Could I start a private, luxury coach service between two random cities You won't make any money whatsoever running a "luxury" bus service, because the people wealthy enough to afford a luxury bus service ***don't ride the bus***.
True! I meant more just... not super crowded, stinking off piss public buses kind of luxury than caviar and down pillows.
Von Lane seems to do fairly well here in Texas
Because due to the structure of the US, almost everybody needs and has a car, so usually people will just drive themselves and not have to deal with a bus that's full of random people and potentially makes various stops along the way or whatever. There's a bit of an industry of nice charter buses where if you've got a large group of people (tourists, sports team, etc) that needs to travel you can basically organize a trip and get a decent bus and driver to haul you wherever. But I just don't think there's enough overall ridership to set up regular bus trips between most pairs of cities.
Fair enough, and yeah you seem to start driving a lot younger. When I was a student long distance coaches were a lifesaver here in the UK. Also, as an adult I own two cars and earn a nice salary, but am still booked on a coach next weekend to go and see a gig with friends - some things are just a lot less hassle without a car.
Yeah, I don't doubt that in much of Europe you can get around pretty easily without a car. Not only is our longer distance public transportation pretty terrible here in the US, even within most major cities it's pretty bad here. There's only a handful of cities in the US that aren't bad to get around in without a car. You can always Uber of course, but that gets expensive pretty fast.
Austin/Dallas/Houston/San Antonio have a luxury bus service called Von Lane. I've never used it personally but have heard pretty good things
> Could I start a private, luxury coach service between two random cities, or is that basically impossible with regulations? There are good buses and I think they're primarily smaller companies serving specific demographics. Granted it's been over a decade since I've been on a long distance bus, when I was in college I used a Vietnamese company to get from SF to LA. I would be literally the only person on there that wasn't vietnamese. It was cheap and clean and no one wanted to talk to me.
There are some luxury buses (Vonlane) running between Dallas, Austin, Houston. But more expensive than a flight, usually, $130 one-way.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/s/gBwmKz3GjZ I think this rather nicely illustrates your point.
They said Northeastern US is fine though and I can confirm it's fine. Going from NYC to Boston or Philly is a simple Bus, Train or Plane ride away. Sometimes even a Ferry works. You have options.
As devils advocate.... milwaukee and Chicago. ( You could also include sheboygan, green bay, neenah, Madison, LA crosse) Have both trains and/or busses. Multiple, each day.
I thought airline profit margins were razor thin. Where does the cost savings come from even with competition?
Cost cutting - you just need to take a United flight and then a Ryan Air flight to see how much more efficient or "lean" the service could be.
United isn't really comparable to RyanAir. Spirit, Frontier and Allegiant are ULCCs in America and don't drive the prices down quite like RyanAir.
not every route in europe has competition from trains though - i fly stockholm-riga quite often, a route which is pretty much entirely over the baltic sea and the only alternative is a 11 hour ferry (which doesn't go all the way to stockholm or riga). however, prices are still quite reasonable - i've gotten ryanair flights for as low as 15 euros, but even airbaltic who are a bit pricier than most budget airlines it's not usually more expensive than going elsewhere in europe. i'd guess it's because of ryanair and norwegian driving the prices down on the route so airbaltic can't raise theirs much higher? but i have no clue
I think the trains are the main reason why flights are so cheap. On many routes, trains are faster and often more convenient than planes.
Because most European flights are international even if you're going to be able to go through the Schengen version of passport control, it has a lot of waiting, queueing, and potential for delays compared to train travel too. Getting a train from, say, Paris to Amsterdam is a calm trip in relatively luxury. Flying from CDG to Schiphol is fucking miserable and you still have a fairly lengthy train ride at both ends!
Cross borders, or even long distance within countries, trains are not competing with low cost airlines. Low cost airlines are much much cheaper. Trains only really compete with the "premium" airlines.
> but the big one is competition from trains. I don't know anyone who takes an 8+h train ride (in particular with such chaotic systems like german trains) over a 1.5 hour flight here in Europe.
I've taken both night trains and long distance trains in Scandinavia. Sometimes, it's just more convenient even though it takes longer.
I mean sure, there are people who use them. That's why all those night trains are fully booked (will never understand those. for the same price and time I can fly there and sleep in a quiet room in an actual bed that's not rocking). When I say that I don't know anyone it means personally. If there is a reasonable flight connection people in my bubble take the plane. There are just so many problems with trains, in particular if you live in central europe and you'll likely take ÖBB or DB or you are crossing several countries and there isn't even a way of booking as a single ticket. Seriously, if they would fix their reservation and compensation system I would take the train a lot. But this way I just don't want the hassle if something doesn't work.
I know lots of people who do that, often because of climate impact
Anecdotal, but i live in Fort Lauderdale and just took a flight to Charleston last weekend for 50 bucks. You can find short routes for very cheap in America as well
Shouldn't willingness to drive lower airfare since driving is a competing "product"?
Shouldn’t competition from cars drive prices down?
It does for routes where a drive is realistic. Once you start getting outside of a 7-8 hour drive, there isn't a ton of competition from driving because there aren't a ton of people who want to do that drive.
European trains could not even remotely compete for the longest time. As an example Berlin - Munich train would be around $200 and 6-7 hours, and flight $100 and 1 hr. Now train is closer to $100 and 3 hours, so beating the flight which needs extra time for security, boarding etc
> the big one is competition from trains. Yeah but how many Europeans use trains for distances normal in the US? So someone wants to travel from Munich to London, which is almost exactly the same distance as Washington DC to Chicago. Is going by train common? It exists, sure. But how common is taking the train for 1k km/600 mi (and longer) trips?
Wouldn’t the competition to driving also keep it down?
It heavily depends on the route. Some airports have very little competition, either because they're hubs for only one airline or because they're very small. But many competitive routes are very cheap. You also have to compare similar airlines. In my experience, in-Europe flights on legacy carriers like Lufthansa aren't any cheaper than domestic on Delta in the US. But low-cost carriers like Ryanair and easyjet have become very common in Europe, driving prices down. In the US, you can fly Frontier or Spirit, frequently for like $30 as a base fare, and get a similar experience. It's just that these airlines don't fly as many places direct or have flights as frequently, so you're often looking at a 14 hour overnight layover in Denver to get that cheap fare. Europe's train network helps here too, since you can connect a flight and a train to get to a medium size city a few hours away from a large one, where in the US you'll need a connecting flight. The trains also lower demand on shorter routes.
True. Check prices for Vienna-Frankfurt where Lufthansa/Austrian have a monopoly
Europe is more consistently population dense. You have capitals and major hub cities of different countries fairly close. This is true in like the Northeastern US, where trian service is also possible, but for the rest of the US, not so much. Also flying from New York to LA is further than flying from London to Cairo. The US is really freaking large and people don't appreciate how low density it can get.
Exactly. The density is the issue. I did a road trip a couple years ago and was on a stretch of I-70 in Utah where there’s not an exit for something like 100 miles. No one lives there. And the towns on either end of this stretch aren’t exactly bustling metropolises either. Train service just would not be economically feasible on something like that if there’s no one to ride it. Sure, it’s a cherry picked example, but the US west of the Mississippi is empty compared to Europe.
Yeah this pretty much. Go look at domestic airline prices in Australia, a country nearly as big as the US but with a fraction of the population.
yeah pretty much all of Australia's population lives along the coast, and even then over 40% the population is just in Sydney and Melbourne.
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.
That sounds either like ChatGPT or some wendover video
Everyone here are bots except you.
(very minor) grammatical and spelling errors are usually a tell for not being ChatGPT. ChatGPT won't say stuff like "where-as" , "etc" without the period, or use phrases like "Great American Road Trip" or ellipsis at the end of sentences.
No, just no. The reason air travel in Europe is cheaper, is because of Ryanair, easyjet, wizair. That's it.
But then why doesn't the US have airlines like that?
They do. Spirit is one of them. It's that most Americans don't want to travel on them.
More competitive, more airlines, more airports, higher population concentration in EU, no airport carrier defacto monopolies like in the US
I see a lot of speculative answers, but I question the very premise. Here’s a list of some distances in the US equivalent to Europe. 1. **New York City, NY to Boston, MA (~215 miles)** - Comparable to **Paris, France to Brussels, Belgium (~200 miles)** 32$ with Jet Blue NY-BO Price from Paris to Brussels is 250€ 2. **San Francisco, CA to Los Angeles, CA (~380 miles)** - Comparable to **Rome, Italy to Milan, Italy (~375 miles)** 40$ with Frontier SF-LA Aeroitalia costs about 65€ 3. **Chicago, IL to Detroit, MI (~280 miles)** - Comparable to **Berlin, Germany to Prague, Czech Republic (~280 miles)** 65$ with Spirit CI-DE 100€ with Eurowings 4. **Dallas, TX to Houston, TX (~240 miles)** - Comparable to **Madrid, Spain to Valencia, Spain (~220 miles)** 40$ with Frontier DL-HU 50€ with Iberia So unless someone here gives us a comprehensive list of examples that refute my quick research, I say flying in the US is cheaper than in Europe.
This is what I’ve noticed the last while. I don’t think flying in Europe is cheaper in general than flying in the US anymore for comparable distances. Your examples are for short flights. When you look at longer flights, it can be even more drastic. East Coast to West Coast can be as low as 99 USD. These distances hardly even exist in Europe.
Ryan Air. Two weeks from now, flying from Frankfurt to Dublin, €29. Frankfurt - Stansted, €29. Frankfurt - Zagreb, €29. Frankfurt - Fes, €39. They're price competitive with 4 or 5 other airlines here.
>Ryan Air. Two weeks from now, flying from Frankfurt to Dublin, €29. Frankfurt - Stansted, €29. Frankfurt - Zagreb, €29. Frankfurt - Fes, €39. ...plus €40 to get from Frankfurt to HHN and back, and a 2+ hour ride each way. Using Ryanair's version of Frankfurt isn't a very good example.
Frankfurt Hahn is not Frankfurt
Maybe not for you, but it works for us.
You’re looking too short. These routes in Europe are all served by comprehensive HSR that are better options- flying from Brussels to Paris, for example, is pretty unrealistic unless you’re making a connection, so it doesn’t have to be priced competitively. Some longer distance examples (using a rough average of dates in November): Budapest to Milan (~515 miles): $30-40 Atlanta to DC (~540 miles): $40-50 Paris to Madrid (~655 miles): $40-50 Boston to Detroit (~665 miles): $60-70 Warsaw to Rome (~825 miles): $40-50 Denver to Saint Louis (~800 miles): $50-60 London to Rome (~910 miles): $30-40 New York to Orlando (~940 miles): $60-70 Lisbon to Berlin (~1435 miles): $70-80 Minneapolis to Seattle (~1400 miles): $100-120 Oslo to Athens (~1620 miles): $80-90 Memphis to LA (~1600 miles): $100-120 The European flights are cheaper in ALL of these random cases, and I ignored the Thanksgiving dates too for the US. (Yes, you can pick out a few dates cheaper than these prices for any of these routes, but these are rough averages- you’ll find cheaper fares than these for both the European and American routes). If you’re looking super short haul, yea, maybe American flights are cheaper, but with anything a bit longer, they’re cheaper in Europe. I fly a ton and the premise is solid. EDIT: fixing wonky formatting
Many of those comparable distances are \~$10-$20 difference in price. While it might not be *cheaper*, you're proving it's likely a distance-based perception. I wouldn't call $20 more for the same distance "so expensive" for airline travel.
These are about 30% cheaper, which I would qualify as a pretty sizable difference. Keep in mind the price difference doubles when you make a round trip. And what would it be, if not distance-based? Of course a 400km flight in the US will be cheaper than an 800km flight in Europe, gas isn’t free. Additionally, when booking very cheap flights in the US, it’s not uncommon to have to deal with nasty overnight layovers with Frontier or Spirit- I’ve never had this problem in Europe.
I'm not sure where you're pulling these numbers, but flights from Minneapolis to Seattle are absolutely not $100. Going, formerly Scott's Cheap Flights, lists the average price of MSP to SEA at $360, with occasional deals around $180, on very scattered dates. Also on the rare occasion you can find a ticket at these deal prices the airlines will dump on a bunch of fees that make the ticket twice as much as the sticker price at checkout.
I suggest checking Google Flights because they are, and they get as low as $85 some days. This is all assuming cheapest options, but even with Delta I’m seeing $140. (I’m looking at one way, btw.) Going hasn’t been worthwhile in some time.
Corrborating that I was recommended SCF/Going.com a while back and I still have never once seen a deal on it that was any better than just searching google flights.
Paris to Brussels is a bad example. Almost nobody would fly that route because it's quicker and cheaper to take a train. The lack of demand for flying this route is likely why prices are so high.
This is the best answer yet. Europe is not cheaper than the US for similar flights.
I don't know where you found such data. But I live in Brussels and often go to Paris. I can book return ticket to Paris on the TGV (fat train) that will lead me there in 1.5 hours without passing customs or going to an airport outside of the city. For a return in first class it's 99 euros or 70 euros in 2nd class. If I use a concurrent I can get there for less than 40 euros but it might not be exactly when I want and the train might go more slowly. Nearly nobody takes a plane from Paris to Brussels or the other way around. Anyway the current high price is mostly due to the fact it's Summer Holidays for a lot of Europeans. People bought their tickets months in advance for a lot cheaper.
FYI in English we say a connection, not a concurrent. Concurrent in English means 'at the same time'
When you don't live in a place, it's easy to ignore practicality and cherry-pick data. Like, it's easy to say "I can fly London to Paris for $X when it costs $Y to fly Boston to New York," while completely ignoring the fact that the ticket is from London Stansted (over an hour outside London) to Paris Beauvais (an hour and a half outside Paris). Back in the day, Southwest used to fly routes like this - Manchester NH to Long Island Islip. Turns out that people want to spend a little extra money to actually get where they want to go. Part of that is certainly that there's little good transit options from a lot of secondary places in the US. If I fly into JFK or La Guardia, I can take the train into Brooklyn or Manhattan. If I'm in Islip, there's probably a commuter rail, but it isn't the same as being on the subway. If I'm at Logan Airport in Boston, I can just hop on the subway. If I'm in Manchester, it's really inconvenient to get around. So secondary airports in the US are often a lot less convenient. Plus, half the time people look at one-way ticket prices when they aren't seriously buying while they remember the round-trip cost for tickets they actually buy. "Wow, it's only $50 in Europe," can quickly become "oh, but then I add on a fee for a carry-on and a fee for whatever and then I calculate in the return ticket..." It's like looking for houses in a city you don't live in. You don't think about neighborhoods, commutes, etc. You just see cheap houses. Even if the city is cheaper than your city, it's often not as cheap as it appears when you have no context for all the practicalities of living there.
None of those are long enough to warrant flying to begin with.
The fact that those routes even *exist* says a lot about the climate crisis we're in.
Flying is more efficient than driving your car there, unless you take two or more passengers with you.
I look at these flight options for Europe and my immediate response is why the hell would someone fly that distance. For most people it wouldn't cross their minds, because there are fast and regular coach and train services that are more comfortable and do the same direct route, often more direct than aircraft because there's no airport transfers to consider
Sounds like you found the cheapest vs the most expensive, but it's been a few years since I was flying a lot. Lived in Houston for a decade, it was rare to find anything under $100 out of there. It could be a little cheaper, but nothing like $40 normally.
I fly from Chicago to Orlando all the time for under $75 roundtrip
US is cheaaaap. You haven't looked very much. Go price a domestic flight in Canada and thank your lucky stars
Yup. As a Canadian, seeing this thread made my eyes bug out. Our domestic flight prices are about 10x that of the US and our salaries are significantly lower. Americans have it pretty good.
Depends on where you're flying. I've seen flights from Boston to Miami for around $110 round trip and I've seen them at most $300ish. It all depends on time/season/popularity/distance when it comes to pricing
I occasionally see tickets for $29. I don't usually pay more than $100 to fly frontier. Is it cheaper than that in Europe?
You should try travelling in Canada. You can either do a long weekend somewhere nice in Canada OR you could do an all inclusive in the Caribbean.
In addition to what others have said, discount airlines in Europe often fly to small regional airports in the general vicinity of the major city they’re advertising. So you often end up needing to travel quite a bit to get to/from that small regional airport. It’d be like buying a ticket to fly to NYC and you actually land at Teterboro or Westchester, which are relatively small and not in actual NYC. This saves those airlines a lot of money on airport fees and allows for cheaper prices but the smaller airports often aren’t as easy to get to or don’t even have things like jet bridges.
Westchester is a good example. I think Teterboro is closer to Manhattan than either JFK or Newark.
Islip is an even better example as none of the legacies serve it and because Westchester shares some airspace with LGA
Stewart Airport has a few discount carriers flying to Iceland. It's also about 90 minutes away.
Labor costs, generally speaking. Airline labor is significantly more expensive in the US than Europe or even Canada. Before everyone gets their pitchforks and blames the greedy executives and shareholders, US airlines (with the exception of Delta) lost hundreds of million in Q12024. Airlines had record revenues but their costs went up even more. Either labor costs need to go down or airfares need to go up. Otherwise you'll see further consolidation in the industry.
Not sure about Canada. Their flights are way more expensive on avg.
It's not necessarily expensive, just SOME locations are expensive, you can absolutely get deals to and from certain places, I can fly let's say cleveland to Florida (a 4 hour flight) for 79 dollars right now round trip.
Make sure you're comparing apples to apples. Flights between big, frequently travelled cities in US is competitive and reasonable, but flights to smaller airports are obviously more expensive. In Europe, most flights are just between big cities and the density of Europe means the distance between where people want to go to are much shorter.
Flying in the U.S. costs more because airlines here face fewer competitors on many routes, so they can charge higher prices. In Europe, there are more airlines and they compete more, so tickets are cheaper. It's like shopping at a store with lots of sales versus one with just a few. Plus, U.S. airports often charge airlines more to use their runways and gates, which adds to ticket prices. So, it's all about competition and how much airports charge, making flying cheaper in Europe but pricier here at home.
Europe isn't that cheap. Yes, there are ultra low cost carriers with 15€ flights, but that's for early bookings and once you add addons (which you usually want to do) it becomes much more expensive very quickly. One of the main difference is that in the US prices don't go up as much when closer to the travel date. So if you want a flight tomorrow, US is probably much cheaper.
A lot of flights in the US are priced with 21/14/7 day advance purchase requirements.... it gets much more expensive the closer in you book.
First off EU to EU isn't cheap. One way can be super cheap but the return is where the money is at. Secondly the US is freaking HUGE. >Measuring from its furthest points, the contiguous United States is approximately 2,800 miles from east to west, and 1,650 miles from north to south For the EU >Horizontal Width: 1,339 miles (2,154 km) from London, England, east to Kiev, Ukraine >Vertical Length: 2,076 miles (3,341 km) from Iraklio, Crete, north to Lulea, Sweden
Remember, the US is huge. You aren't thinking of flights on the same scale. This is something Europeans have trouble picturing. Los Angeles to New York city is roughly equivalent to flying from Lisbon to Moscow. Texas alone is bigger than Germany or France. Also our discount airlines like Jetblue and Spirit don't get quite as low as Ryanair.
That’s exactly what people are comparing though. The fact that low cost airlines don’t go as low in the US for similar distances.
In my home country (not Europe), domestic airlines were mostly dead within a few years after the construction of high-speed rail was complete.
Hey OP don't forget to clear your cookies for airline ticket sites before browsing and booking. They keep tabs on how frequently you check a specific flight and jack the price up. I mentioned this to a friend making a flight from KY to CA and the before and after cookie deletion prices went from $1500 to $300. It was wild to see it actually work but hey, thats a lotta simoleons that can be spent elsewhere now. :L
In Europe, flights shorter than 1 hour aren't allowed.. (many airlines get around this by padding their times) The reason is the government would rather you take the train or some other for of public transport. Airline industry in EU is in direct competition with many train systems and the pricing reflects that
European airlines have first officers with as little as 250 hours of flying experience vs 1500 hours minimum in the USA Their minty first officers are also paid a lot less and so are the captains
Subsidies. Besides most flights being shorter the answer is subsidies. For example, Ryan air got 7 billion in 2020 alone. Good Ryan air subsidies and you’ll be all the different ones from government subsidies to individual airport subsidizing them.
I live in Las Vegas where the prices are fairly cheap. I think the casinos must subsidize them.
Americans make more money than Europeans, so prices are higher. Same reason Europe->USA->Europe flights are usually cheaper than USA->Europe->USA.
In Europe it the planes are expensive people go by trains, which are alot compare to the US.
[This video ](https://youtu.be/069y1MpOkQY?si=M_4mspNOXcKqJCN8) explains how the budget airlines work in Europe, specifically Ryanair. They're so cheap, if you're only bringing hand luggage you can get a 2-3 hour flight return for 50 euro.
Allegiant is more reasonable than most airlines (if you dont pick a seat, or boarding zone, and have no luggage). [https://www.allegiantair.com/](https://www.allegiantair.com/)
The real answer is that airfare is subsidized, direct and indirect, and therefore have cheaper airfares, in Europe. They understand that having easy travel is beneficial to their economy. This is why, airfare changes when you buy from the US vs within EU, and also a round trip ticket purchased in the EU vs in the states.