What Goes Up Must Come Down - Unless Its An Airfare

David J. Danto

Travel thoughts in my own, personal opinion

eMail: ddanto@IMCCA.org Follow Industry News: @NJDavidD on

What Goes Up Must Come Down. Unless It’s an Airfare. March 2026

There’s an old expression that says what goes up must come down. In most corners of life, that still holds. Gravity works. Bubbles burst. Trends fade. Even the airplanes themselves, thankfully, do in fact come back down.

But in the airline industry, that law seems to apply only to the physical metal. The planes come down. The prices do not.

I was thinking about that this week when I rushed to buy my own airfare to a conference I need to attend this June. Newark to Las Vegas, round trip, at reasonable times, came to $429 all in. In today’s travel environment, that almost felt merciful. Not a great deal, exactly, but at least something in the range of civilized. So, I bought it, because I have seen this movie before, and I know how these stories go. If we check that same itinerary again in a week, there is a very good chance it will not still be that same price.

And no, that is not because the flight suddenly got better. The seat will not be wider. The boarding process will not be less dehumanizing. The gate area will not transform into a private club with passed hors d’oeuvres and a string quartet. It will just cost more, because somewhere in the distance there is another crisis, another excuse, another “temporary” market adjustment that somehow manages to become permanent with breathtaking speed.

This time, of course, the excuse is not hard to find. There is now a war expanding in the Middle East, with regional players getting dragged into the orbit of the conflict. While the real collateral damage to the region is sadly likely to be significant, anyone who has flown more than twice in the last twenty years knows exactly what comes next at the airlines. The price of fuel goes up. Airlines start to feel “pressure.” Analysts begin talking about fare increases. Revenue management teams get that warm, familiar glow. And before long, ticket prices start creeping upward.

What is especially rich about this routine is that these increases are never initially presented as the greed they are – we’re told they are a necessity, of course. Fuel surcharge. Security surcharge. Facility charge. Segment fee. Recovery fee. Call it whatever you want. The names change, but the trick stays the same. A new cost gets introduced or highlighted, travelers are told it is regrettable but unavoidable, and the increase gets baked into the cost of flying.

Then the original reason weakens or disappears, and the higher price remains anyway.

That has been one of the airline industry’s greatest talents for decades. Not flying, mind you. Not boarding. Not operational transparency. Heaven knows, not customer service. No, their great genius has been in taking supposedly temporary increases and turning them into permanent features of the landscape.

Take the Passenger Facility Charge. That one showed up in the early 1990s and was sold as a way to help airports fund improvements. Fine. Then there are the federal segment taxes, which keep inching along and quietly adding up. After 9/11 came the security fees, which were understandable in context, but like everything else in aviation, once they were in place they never developed any urge to leave. In fact, they evolved, expanded, and settled in like a relative who said they were only staying for the weekend, then quietly filled out change-of-address cards.

Then there were the airline-invented charges.

The fuel spike era of 2008 was one of the clearest examples. Oil prices went wild, airlines threw fuel surcharges onto tickets, and the industry made a great theatrical production out of how impossible it had all become. At the same time, checked bag fees started appearing and spreading across the majors, supposedly as part of coping with higher fuel and operating costs. Travelers were told, implicitly or explicitly, that the world had changed and these new charges reflected harsh realities.

Then fuel prices came down. Did the new fees disappear? Of course not.

Did airlines turn around and say, good news everybody, the emergency has passed and we’re restoring the old model? Please. They kept the fees, normalized them, and then built entire financial expectations around them. What began as a reaction became a revenue stream. That is the pattern every time. The crisis may be temporary. The monetization never is.

That is why I laugh every time someone treats the latest price increase as if it is a brief weather event. In the airline business, there is no such thing as a temporary fare increase once the market proves it will tolerate it. The separate surcharge may vanish. The language may soften. Regulators may require the all-in fare to be shown more clearly. But the money does not go away. It just gets folded into the base fare, hidden in another bucket, or quietly accepted as the new normal.

The shell game is the whole business model. They just keep moving the charge around and hoping you’ll mistake relocation for removal.

And that is why I rushed to buy my June ticket, then checked the rest of my travel calendar to see what else I should pre-buy before the next round of increases hits.

The next few days are likely to bring a wave of higher pricing driven by fuel concerns, geopolitical instability, and the usual industry instinct to charge first and explain later. Once that increase works its way into the system, it is not coming back out just because the headlines or crude oil prices eventually calm down.

That is the part travelers need to understand. The airline industry has trained us to think in terms of events, but prices live in memory. The war happens now. Oil spikes now. Fares rise now. But when oil settles, when the route network adjusts, when the talking heads move on to the next crisis, the customer rarely sees a neat reversal. The industry has already learned that people will pay the higher fare or the added fee, and once that lesson is learned, it tends to stick.

If Sir Isaac Newton had spent more time in airline terminals, he might have updated the law. What goes up must come down, unless it has been touched by airline accounting. Then it goes up, gets justified in a press release, and remains suspended in the atmosphere forever.

At this point, the only thing in commercial aviation that reliably comes down is the aircraft. The rest of it just hovers above your wallet.

So, if you have travel coming up and you know you are going, buy the ticket. Buy it now, before the latest round of fuel panic and geopolitical uncertainty gets fully digested into the fare structure. Because once the airlines decide they have found a new altitude for pricing, they are not exactly known for descending gracefully.

Planes land.

Airfares don’t.

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This article was written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions.

All image and links provided above as reference under prevailing fair use statutes.

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As always, feel free to write and comment, question or disagree. Hearing from the traveling community is always a highlight for me. Thanks!