Chapter 8 Baggage Fees and Changes in Airline Ticket Prices

The past several years have seen dramatic increases in oil prices, which have adversely impacted airlines, with the average price of jet fuel increasing from $1.34 per gallon between 1995 and 2005 to $2.81 per gallon between 2006 and 2009. As a partial response to these increases in costs, many airlines have introduced fees for services that were previously provided to their customers free of charge. One such charge is a fee on checked baggage, which most airlines introduced in 2008. These charges have been successful in increasing airline revenues, so successful that many airlines have increased their fees multiple times over the past two years. Baggage fees have also enabled airlines to avoid dramatic increases in their airfares, which may result in significantly fewer customers, as these additional fees generate revenues, but since they are not collected when passengers book their tickets, the cost of air travel on these airlines appears lower than it actually is. The most notable exception to this pattern of charging baggage fees is Southwest Airlines, which has launched a “Bags Fly Free” advertising campaign in an attempt to differentiate their product from that of fee charging airlines. In this chapter, we use a spatial autoregressive model to analyze what impact the increase in fuel costs, and the introduction of baggage fees have had on ticket prices. Our results suggest that increases in jet fuel prices are passed along to travelers in the form of higher ticket prices but that baggage fees actually reduce ticket prices, as airlines may substitute baggage fee revenue for ticket revenue to become more competitive on their airfare. We also find that Southwest Airlines has increased their ticket prices on routes in which they compete with fee charging firms, leveraging their “Bags Fly Free” product differentiation to increase their revenues.