Will Airfares Drop With Oil Prices?

Aug. 6, 2008 — -- With apologies -- and thanks -- to the Grateful Dead, I've got to say it's been a really long, strange trip aboard the airlines this year.

It's been a real wild ride, thanks to real wild oil prices. Let me get specific: in one very short, tumultuous year, air travel has marched headlong into a new era of a la carte pricing. Today, an airline ticket is little more than an expensive, one-time pass to get on and off an airplane. True, that ticket comes with a guarantee of basic safety and hygiene services (no pay toilets yet!), but beyond that … anything extra is going to ring the airline cash registers.

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You know that US Airways now charges for a can of Coke -- and even water. But did you know that JetBlue now charges $7 for a blanket and pillow?

As I said, the catalyst for U.S. aviation being turned upside down sits squarely on the shoulders of the unprecedented rise in the cost of fuel. Many of us have watched -- in horror -- as the price of oil sailed from $70 to more than $140 a barrel in a single year.

But recently, the price of oil slid below $120 a barrel. That's a drop of almost 20 percent, and the drop has occurred in the past three weeks alone. Why? Who knows? Maybe T. Boone Pickens has scared off speculators with threats of billion-dollar wind farms; or maybe it's been all those politicos wrangling over energy as they seek to grab the moral high ground; or maybe it's that we really have started to change our energy consumption habits. No matter, it seems more and more likely each day that we could see oil drop below $100 a barrel -- more likely, certainly, than oil hitting $200 this fall, as was predicted by a number of analysts.

That leaves us with two very big questions: now that prices are coming down, what are the airlines going to do about their current and (relatively) high ticket prices, and what are they going to do with that boatload of new and increased "revenue-enhancing" fees?