"These are the highest year-over-year airfare increases I've ever seen," says Travelocity editor at large Amy Ziff.
For travel industry executives, the implications of less air service at higher prices are grim.
"You can see this spilling over into the whole travel business," says Choice Hotels CEO Steve Joyce, whose company owns 10 hotel chains, including Comfort Inn and Econo Lodge. "We are getting hit."
At a recent conference, Marriott International CEO J.W. Marriott Jr. reported softening in both business and leisure travel. Marriott said companies are reducing business travel and that last-minute group bookings are slowing.
But the good news for travelers is that many hotels are responding by discounting nightly rates and throwing in other incentives such as free gas.
Widespread hotel discounting is front and center at travel websites including Expedia.com, the world's largest travel-booking site, which is promoting a hotel sale on its home page. For the first time on Expedia this year, hotels are offering discounts up to 50% off normal rates. More than 400 hotels in 23 cities are participating — double last year's number.
"We're seeing really good hotel deals in Hawaii, Las Vegas, Orlando and the Caribbean," says Paul Brown, president of Expedia North America.
He notes that hotels likely to suffer most as a result of reductions in air service are those totally dependent on flights for visitors — destinations such as the Hawaiian Islands, the Bahamas, and Puerto Rico and other islands in the Caribbean.
But several top leisure and convention destinations in the Lower 48 states, such as Las Vegas, are also hurt by air-service cuts because they depend so heavily on visitors flying in. Because Las Vegas passengers are more likely to be leisure travelers paying low fares than are, say, passengers to Chicago, airlines have aggressively cut service to those types of destinations.
By November, Las Vegas McCarran Airport, the USA's seventh busiest, will have nearly 16% fewer airline seats on departing flights than a year earlier, OAG schedule figures show.
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