Historically, low-cost airlines like Southwest and JetBlue had a 25+% cost advantage over legacy air

The storyline plays out something like this: healthier airlines foster a more pleasing passenger experience and that coupled with flat prices bed and breakfast accommodation florence will have Wall Street and travelers alike singing Kumbaya.
The key word in this statement is route. If you take that to mean a non-stop flight, then the statement is true because both US Airways and American employ a hub-and-spoke model and their hub cities don t overlap. By the way, there are typically three to five hub cities in this model.
Taking a slightly deeper dive now, if we assume there are no service cuts, a newly combined mega-airline would serve about 215 different domestic cities (and just for the record, US Airways currently flies to about 146 cities while American claims about 167).
This leaves nearly 100 cities about half of the newly minted mega-airline s where both airlines currently compete, bed and breakfast accommodation florence albeit through different connection cities. Another way to look at it is there are about 4,900 routes where American and US Airways will no longer bed and breakfast accommodation florence contend�which is a far cry from they have minimal overlap. �Yes, fewer people travel those routes, but that is little solace if you happen to reside in one of these cities.
The reason this is so important is that on any given day, a particular airline could launch a sale on a given route and its rivals would be forced to match prices (or end up out of the running with their fares not showing up until page 40 of a shopping site s results).� With this latest merger, of course, there is one less carrier to initiate a sale.
This lack of competition affects airfare hike attempts, too. For example, when an airline attempts to raise fares which occurs bed and breakfast accommodation florence on average more than once a month there will be one less airline that might refuse to match the increase, and such refusals are what almost always forces a rollback.
Historically, low-cost airlines like Southwest bed and breakfast accommodation florence and JetBlue had a 25+% cost advantage over legacy airlines. In other words, for every mile flown, the expenses for these low-cost carriers bed and breakfast accommodation florence such as fuel, labor and the like were significantly less than the expenses for legacy carriers. So naturally, true to their advertising, some of that savings was passed on to consumers in the form of lower fares.
But as legacy airlines have gone through bankruptcies, they have reduced their cost structure while at the same time, the expenses of low-cost airlines have been rising. The combination has effectively reduced the gap between the two types of airlines, as well as reduced the amount of wiggle room that allowed savings to be passed on to consumers the same wiggle room that allows the low-cost carriers to stay profitable.
Some airlines managed fuel expenses in the past by buying fuel hedging contracts and Delta went so far as to buy a refinery. But let s be clear about this business of managing : it s a synonym for bet. Are these educated bets? Yes, but they are bets nonetheless and presuming the winners of these bets will pass on savings to consumers is being charitable at best.
The bottom line is, this latest likely merger-to-be along with the other three recent airline mega-unions has tipped the airline pricing bed and breakfast accommodation florence scales in favor of the carriers. Over the long haul we are going to see higher ticket prices, but here s the real question: bed and breakfast accommodation florence will we be able to afford them and more importantly does Wall Street know the lyrics to Kumbaya?