Anchorage Daily News

It costs more to fly to and from Anchorage than any other major city in the country, but figuring out why can be as hopeless as squeezing a Sumo wrestler into a middle seat.

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"The first thing to remember," said Harry Gregson, a travel agency owner since 1976, "is nothing makes sense about airfare prices. There is no rhyme or reason to them."

For years, he noted, it didn't cost a whole lot more to fly from here to Boston than it did to fly from here to Seattle, even though there's an entire continent separating the two destinations. And it typically costs less to fly from here to Seattle than it does to fly to Juneau.

Gregson, the owner of Easy Travel, said fares often have as much to do with competition and what the market will bear as they do with the actual cost of fueling and flying a jumbo jet.

A report released Wednesday by the U.S. Bureau of Transportation says that in the fourth quarter of last year, Anchorage airfares were the highest of 100 airports studied.

The average ticket price in Anchorage cost $539. Next on the list was Cincinnati at $532, followed by San Francisco at $428.

Four Hawaiian airports topped the list of places with the least expensive airfares -- $130 to $183 -- mostly because much of their travel involves short, inter-island flights. The fifth least expensive is Dallas Love airport, which gets a lot of business from low-cost air carrier Southwest Airlines.

The study looked at 10 percent of all domestic flights and didn't include small carriers like those that serve the Alaska Bush.

Mark Eliason, owner of USTravel, thinks Anchorage prices are high because the flights are long.

"We're just dealing with more geography," he said. "Our short hauls aren't very short. Out of Dallas, a lot of flights are to places like Houston or San Antonio. With our in-state market, we're dealing with a whole different kind of geography."

Since 2000, Anchorage fourth-quarter airfares have risen 18 percent -- from $458 to $539 -- the ninth-largest among 100 airports studied.

Eliason said that's probably because there are more people flying but fewer seats are available today than seven years ago.

"We used to have a lot more service in 2000," he said.

Some airlines that used to fly between Alaska and the Lower 48 year-round now only make those trips during the summer tourism season, he said. Some have reduced their number of daily flights.

Over the same period, business travel has increased, Eliason said, as has off-season tourism. With fewer flights and more people flying, flights are fuller than ever. The result? Not everyone is going to get one of the so-called cheap seats.

If a plane has room for 140 passengers, Eliason explained, the first 100 seats sold are the cheap, or discounted, ones. The last 40 sold usually aren't discounted.

"The fuller the airplane, the more higher-priced tickets the airline is going to sell," he said.

Find Beth Bragg online at adn.com/contact/bbragg or call 257-4309.

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