The flight was a far more joyless and unpleasant experience than it had ever been, except for two things. It is much safer and, although it is hard to believe now, it is much cheaper.
A first-class return ticket from Frankfurt to New York cost as much as a new Mercedes-Benz car in 1961. But 50 years later, a new Mercedes cost 13 times the fare, a German aviation chief once told me.
Likewise, when Australia’s Qantas first began overseas flights in 1935, a trip from Sydney to London cost 122 weeks of the average worker’s salary, according to the current head of plane, Alan Joyce. In 2010, you can do it for more than a week’s pay.
But if you’re new to flying, one of the last words that probably comes to mind is “cheap”.
Last December, I paid more for an economy seat than I can remember giving up my life to fly from London to Melbourne, and not just because of Christmas.
Air fares from London to New York, Los Angeles, Rome, Singapore, Dubai and a host of other destinations will average as high as a decade by 2022, say analysts at airline data firm OAG .
The price increases come as airlines and airports affected by the pandemic face increased demand from travel-hungry passengers preparing to make up for lost time.
Fares are still high on many routes in this inflationary year and as OAG analyst Becca Rowland says: “It doesn’t seem to be stopping people from travelling.”
This is especially true if your travel is for leisure. But business travel, which often takes longer to recover than leisure after a rainstorm, has yet to return to pre-pandemic health and it’s unclear when it will.
It’s not a big surprise when business class return fares on routes such as London to New York have been hovering around the £7,500 mark for months.
Travel managers in the US and Europe say higher airfares and hotel rates are now the main deterrent to more business travel, Deloitte reported this month.
Managers think that the total amount of corporate travel spending may not return to 2019 levels until late 2024. But worldwide, the latest annual forecasts of the Global Business Travel Association show that spending is not expected to fully recover until mid-2026, and not just because of higher winds. fare.
The association’s chief executive, Suzanne Neufang, said environmental concerns meant business travelers were under pressure to make “more purposeful trips”. By this he means fewer, longer and more productive trips, as opposed to hopping to New York and back for a meeting.
Anecdotally, I have heard many stories that support this trend. But at the same time, climate campaigners say 85 percent of the world’s companies have yet to develop a credible plan to cut their business aviation emissions. Also, I know at least one business traveler in London who is taking more day trips than ever before, because it saves on hotel fees.
There’s another reason people think business travel might not be what it used to be: the rise of Zoom meetings.
In theory this makes sense, but technological advances don’t always produce the results one expects.
That is a lesson taught by Vint Cerf. The American internet pioneer once told a colleague that when engineers at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency invented electronic email in 1971, they thought that travel budgets would decrease because workers would not should always meet in person. But five years later, the cost of travel has actually quadrupled.
Email means that employees can work with more people than ever before, in more distant places, on bigger projects. Face-to-face meetings are still necessary, of course, and they are more expensive to organize, so travel costs increase.
I suspect business travel patterns will continue to change thanks to the rise of flexible working, and even more so due to climate change concerns. But I wouldn’t be surprised if that change turns out to be very different from what is currently expected.
pilita.clark@ft.com