Do Cheap Airfare Specials Hurt the Environment—or Help It?

Flickr/<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/duncanh1/" target="_blank">~Duncan~</a>

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


A while back, I griped about the environmental irresponsibility of a recent JetBlue promotion that offered $20 last-minute round trip fares to various US cities. A bunch of commenters pointed out that in a way, specials like this actually save CO2 emissions, since they put butts in would-be empty seats. But I was still skeptical: Even if cheap fares help fill seats, don’t they just create more demand for flights in the long run?

The short answer is that it depends on the nature of your trip. Mikhail Chester, a UC-Berkeley post-doctoral researcher in civil and environmental engineering, points out that sometimes cheap fares can actually help prevent car trips. “If you were planning on driving from San Francisco to LA, but you decide to hop on a cheap flight at the last minute instead, that’s one less car trip,” says Chester. “But if you buy a cheap ticket on a whim, that’s different.” Let’s say I had gone to Austin for the evening, like my roommate wanted to. All of a sudden, we’re talking restaurants, bars, hotel stay, and maybe even a car rental—all of which create emissions I would have avoided by spending a quiet evening at home.

But the long answer is more complicated, and it helps to understand why airlines offer bargain fares in the first place. Chester’s colleague Megan Smirti Ryerson studies airline-ticket pricing models. Ryerson explained to me that although airlines typically don’t make money on these deals, cheap flights do help them stay competitive. At many airports, each airline is alotted a certain number of take-off time slots every hour. “If you don’t use your slot 80 percent of the time, you’re going to lose it to one of your competitors,” says Ryerson. So in the long run, it makes more financial sense for an airline to keep all of its slots than give them up, even if the flights aren’t completely full. “It would be so much more efficient to get everyone on a larger plane and have less frequent flights,” says Ryerson. “But in order to be competitive, airlines have to oversupply frequency to assert their market dominance.”

Cheap fares are also an excellent marketing strategy, says Ryerson. “JetBlue tweets to their millions of followers about the deals, and those tweets get retweeted,” she says. “It gets people to the website. And even if those people don’t use the cheap fares, maybe they are looking for another flight.”

Bottom line: Considering that planes will probably take off regardless of whether they’re full, indulging in a cheap flight once in a while is okay, especially if you’re saving a car trip. But don’t allow those JetBlue specials to let you forget about air travel’s giant carbon footprint. If everyone flew less overall (which would be a whole lot easier if our rail system wasn’t so inconvenient and slow), maybe airlines wouldn’t find it worth their while to send all those half-empty planes up into the air in the first place.

Got a burning eco-quandary? Submit it to econundrums@motherjones.com. Get all your green questions answered by signing up for our weekly Econundrums newsletter here.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate