Get ready for higher air ticket prices

Get ready for higher air ticket prices:

www.money.cnn.com/2008/02/19/news/companies/northwest_delta_merger/index.htm?cnn=yes

. . . or get ready to help flood the regulators with letters opposing this oligopoly causing merger.

And if you think finding decent cash ticket prices will be hard, finding ff seats will likely be worse.

America West and US Airways have already merged, Northwest and Delta are close to merging and American and Continental are talking about merging. Who's United going to merge with?

Pretty soon the so called legacy carriers will be down to 4. However, there are enough so called no-frills carriers to provide compition to keep rates reasonable. The Airtran's, Frontiers, Spirt, Jet Blue and Southwest's of the industry will help keep the costs down and, who knows they may expand even further.

As it is now the legacy carriers might as well be considered no-frills as the free soda and bag of pretzels have been replaced by a free pop and the chance to buy a snack box for $5 on flights longer than 2 hours. The legacy carriers have reduced the allowable weight limits on luggage from 70 lbs to 50 lbs and United has announced a 1 checked bag limit and a $25 charge per bag for anything over 1 bag.

The way their going, driving is looking like a better option every day.

The US Airways / American West merger is a bit of a sideshow. The NW/DL merger followed by CO tying up with someone, will really change the landscape and lead to an oligopoly of three mega carriers who will try to reduce capacity to drive up prices. That process will also drive down avavilibility of award seats.

Yes, they seem to be overlooking the fact that the LCC sector will simply make more seats avaiible, but they may figure, that outside of Southest, none of the LCC's can expand that fast to fill the gap. But they may have forgotten to look across the Atlantic, where RyanAIr is getting ready to invade their turf, and RyanAir will give them more heartburn than they ever got from JetBlue or Southwest. Just when Ryanair has announced that it will be starting trans-Atlantic service and is studying setting up a US domestic carrier, the legacies conveniently try to alter the market in a way that RyanAir can really come roaring in and eat their lunch.

In the short term, these mergers will bring higher prices and less ff seats, but in the medium to long term, they will mean the demise of the legacy carriers.

Personally, with the top heavy management and the union deals in place at the legacy carriers, I feel most of them are just dead men walking anyway. Many are about to become the next Pan Am's, Braniff's, Ozark's and TWA's of the world.

IMO, 9/11 only slowed the transition down by knocking out a couple of the start up no-frills carriers (Vanguard and National) and slowing down the others.