Last week at the PhocusWright conference in Orlando, Florida, I had the pleasure of presenting with Rick Seaney, the CEO of FareCompare. One topic that we discussed is the impact of changing airfares and capacity upon the upcoming Thanksgiving travel season. There has been significant coverage in the media about many travelers not flying during the Thanksgiving holiday, opting instead to drive or stay at home due to airfare costs, baggage fees, and now additional holiday fees for heavy travel dates. According to a report from the AAA auto club, a 6.7 percent decrease in the number of air travelers is expected this holiday season, totaling only 2.3 million. Similarly online, we have seen visits to a custom category of Airline websites are down 23% for the week ending Nov. 21, 2009 as compared to the same week last year.

However, by comparing the share of visits to Airline websites broken out by DMA year-over-year, we discovered that the decline in visits varies by city. We also wanted to understand how the price of airfares impacts the share of visits, so Rick provided data from FareCompare on the average lowest fares available to purchase between Nov 1 – 5 for the top airports in the US for 2008 and 2009. Additionally, to understand how seat availability would come into play, FareCompare also provided the number of seats available for the Wednesday before Thanksgiving for each of the markets.
Together, the year-over-year change in visits to Airline websites with the year-over-year change in average fares tells an interesting story. Below, the chart shows the markets by total size of visits to the category for that particular DMA in 2009, thus resulting in large bubbles for markets like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Each of the markets/airports in the lower right hand quadrant experienced increased visits and lower airfares. For some of these markets increased competition and available seats help drive the increase, such as Minneapolis (which sits at the furthest to the right), where Southwest launched service this year with flights to Chicago Midway.
For those in the upper left quadrant, airfares went up and visits went down. In each of the markets – Atlanta, Detroit, Orlando and Philadelphia – there was a decline in the number of seats available. For some areas though, lower fares still may not be enough to encourage air travel with continued concerns about the economy and decreased consumer spending.