Interestingly I have noticed that there has been a substantial price hike in seats and availability. I will give you two recent examples.
Mrs Mac is heading down to the family house in Majorca in June from Manchester, which is not normally a problem as plenty of flights with Jet 2, EasyJet, TUI , Ryanair. This year after checking her preferred carrier which has been Jet 2, she was told she was only able to fly on the very early flight in the morning, and the late evening departure returning. She then tried Easy Jet and TUI and got the same response as they reserve the more reasonable flight times for holiday packages. Ryanair when the contacted and the quote was around £400 which seems a tad steep. Doing the same journey last year was around £300 and she could use better flight times.
My other example is with regards to EK, and Business class which on the Manchester to DXB route is now touching around £4k return. I used to use this route on a regular basis, and indeed EK are one of our businesses preferred carriers, with SQ and LH being the other two. Currently LH to DXB from Manchester via Frankfurt is half of the EK fare so I don’t think I will be on the A380 much this year, or at least not from Manchester, and I am at Platinum level with them so have probably paid for a chunk of an A380 over the years.
It seems to me that there is some real gouging of customers going on, and some of these carriers may well be storing up some bad will with this, and I hope it bites some of them in the arse, as I do not see how in the times we are in, those hikes are sustainable !
Cheers
Mr Mac