When Legacy Airlines Degrade Themselves With Budget Fares
Photo Credit: Economy seating in Delta 737s. Delta Air Lines
Skift Take
Legacy carriers should stay on the high ground and market themselves as offering superior products as more passengers will discover the pitfalls of some low-cost carriers with their pay-for-everything-extra-but-a-seat model.
A new type of "budget" fare is creeping into legacy airline networks, including Delta and British Airways, and the trend is dismantling the idea of air travel as we know it.
These legacy airlines are building fares to compete with the likes of Spirit Airlines, Frontier easyJet and Ryanair. Traditionally, strong competition from multiple carriers kept airfares in check. One carrier drops its price on a particular route and the others match that price to compete.
It's a basic, if not prone-to-error, mechanism.
That model gets disrupted, however, by the low-cost carriers lik
