In terms of demand for travel, Friday 20 June is an unremarkable day. Should you wish to fly from Edinburgh to London, you are spoilt for choice – and low fares.
Ryanair is currently selling its morning, afternoon and evening flights from the Scottish capital to Stansted for £17 each – a fare that helps explain why rail firms have not captured the entire London-Edinburgh route from planes.
The cheapest easyJet can offer is £19 to Luton; to Gatwick, you will have to fork out all of £30.
On British Airways, the sophisticated service and generous cabin-baggage allowance aboard the BA CityFlyer jet from Edinburgh to London City will set you back a minimum of £91.
But maybe your heart is set on Heathrow. How about the mid-morning flight on British Airways from Edinburgh, arriving at the UK’s busiest airport at noon?
Better hurry: ba.com says only one seat remains at the lowest fare.
Before I reveal the price, I need to stress that this is a business-class ticket. You can select your seat free of charge for the 95-minute hop. While easyJet and Ryanair will charge you extra for larger cabin baggage and checked luggage, every BA passenger is allowed two pieces of hand baggage. And as a business-class traveller, you can also check in two cases weighing up to 32kg each.
The one-way fare: £1,183.
To convince you that is not a typo, the price equates to £3.50 per mile for the 331-mile trip – compared with 5p per mile on Ryanair. Yes, British Airways wants 70 times more than Europe’s biggest budget airline for essentially the same product: safe and fast transportation between airports near the Scottish and English capitals.
Should you conclude that this is the most egregious example yet of BA’s profiteering? No. The shockingly high fare represents British Airways saying – no, shouting – to prospective travellers: “DO NOT BOOK THIS FLIGHT!”
Next question: why would any airline try to scare off passengers? Because people who want to fly from Edinburgh to Heathrow are not the market that BA is aiming at with the 10.25am departure. The airline is playing a long-haul game.
“The reality is that the airline doesn’t even want to sell that seat,” says the aviation economist Oliver Ranson – whose blog post on the subject spurred my investigation. More specifically: “They don’t want to sell it to a passenger going to London from Edinburgh.
“What they want to do instead is to ensure that the seat is held back for a more profitable, more valuable passenger – somebody on the long-haul network.”
BA’s noon arrival from Edinburgh at Heathrow Terminal 5 connects handily with departures to Riyadh, Bermuda and San Diego. British Airways is betting that a well-heeled traveller (or at least an executive whose company is paying) will come along during the next four weeks and buy a longer trip.
They could pay close to £5,000 for a trip from Edinburgh via Heathrow to the Saudi capital or the prosperous British Overseas Territory in the Atlantic. Better still, there may be a buyer at over £10,000 one way to California’s southernmost city.
“This is practiced by well-managed airlines all over the world,” says Mr Ranson. “They can ensure that, by holding seats back for long-haul passengers they can earn as much revenue as possible.”
The aviation economist pointed me to Qatar Airways in Doha. A posh seat on the 85-minute hop from Kuwait typically sells for over £2,000. That’s £5.70 per mile, or 114 times the benchmark Ryanair fare.
“Every airline wants to make sure that they sell as many long-haul seats as possible, because those are the ones that cost the airline an awful lot of money to provide. So if they’re able to preserve a seat for long-haul connecting passengers by losing a short=haul passenger, it can make sense.”
The airlines are taking a gamble, he says: “If you sell 50 or 75 per cent of them, having a few seats going empty – or, as we say in the trade, “spoiled”, is still worth doing.
“Then passengers know that when they come to their favourite airline, even at the last minute, there’s a good chance they can buy that long-haul seat, which helps the airline preserve its market share, preserve its loyalty, and preserve its ability to generate business from its most valuable passengers.”
But, I wondered, does anybody ever pay extreme fares such as £1,183 from Edinburgh to London?
“Never say never. One guy, one day is going buy this fare because they have to do it – especially if their employer is footing the bill.”
Listen to Oliver Ranson talking to Simon Calder on The Independent’s daily travel podcast
