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The World’s Highest-Earning Airline Route
- thewizardofaus 8y agoIt really surprises me that the Australian domestic flight with Qantas is so high on the list.
- jwilliams 8y agoDoesn't surprise me too much. It's a very busy route -- with a smaller selection of both airlines and airports. Plus Qantas is the perrenial corporate airline. Notice that SFO to Newark makes the list further down. If you summed all Bay Area airports to all New York serving airports. Across all airlines... You might see a closer contest.
- eddy_chan 8y agoThey have a virtual monopoly on the corporate market. At the peak times of Monday morning and Friday evening seats can go for A$300-$A400 or more one way for an economy class seat on a 737 for a 55 minute flight.
- jen729w 8y agoI think membership of the Qantas club has a lot to do with this, and the fact that it's a Oneworld membership. See my comment in this thread about doing MEL-CBR; I was doing that weekly, got Platinum, and am I loyal to Qantas? Sure as shit I am, I can buy an economy ticket to see my family back in the UK and get access to the international First Class lounges. Also the fact is that the Business lounge at CBR is practically an extension of the office from 5-7pm. Everyone you know is there.
- angled 8y agoI wonder how much of their business is a result of QF selectively giving membership to the Chairmans' Lounge? It would surely mean a lot of revenue is steered / kept their way through travel policies. Do any other airlines have an equivalent to CL? I assume the greater availability of private jets in the US rules it out there.
- jen729w 8y agoI don't know, I think the general preferences of a lot of people count for more. I mean, you only have two realistic choices for business: Qantas or Virgin. A friend of mine chose Virgin, for whatever reason, and he tells us their lounges are as nice if not more so than Qantas'... but still he wishes he'd chosen Qantas. They've got just enough of an edge, plus the whole tie-in to the global Oneworld program. Our company's Chairman is a member of the CL, but AFAIK if I requested a Virgin flight that wouldn't be an issue.
- satori99 8y agoSyd-Mel air route is the 2nd busiest in the world, with @55,000 flights/yr. https://www.statista.com/chart/12598/the-worlds-busiest-air-routes/ https://www.statista.com/chart/12598/the-worlds-busiest-air-...
- jcranmer 8y agoJudging from the chart at the end, it looks like monopolistic price gouging explains it. It's the third-highest revenue per hour of the entire list, but the total hours travelled is fairly low compared to others on the list. Compare the three North American transcontinental flights: half the revenue per hour margins, but far more hours traveled, or simultaneously the lowest-margin and most-travelled routes on the list.
- secabeen 8y agoI'm not an air expert, but I would guess that they're only including air hours, not taxiing, loading, unloading, etc. On a short-haul, 50k flights per year route, that's going to be a larger %age of each day.
- jen729w 8y agoThe morning and evening business traffic drives the majority of the profits. You can get to Sydney for ~$100 at the right time of day but I've done MEL-CBR a lot – same direction, not as far – and it's $800 if you want to go at 6:30am and come back at 5pm. The departures board at the Qantas terminal at 6am is funny. There's a flight to Sydney – a fully loaded 737-800 – every 15 minutes. Over in Jetstar it's the same, Virgin the same.
- gsnedders 8y agoNot quite Japan levels, where from Haneda to various other cities you can have flights that frequent, but all 777s/787s.
- kasey_junk 8y agoOhare to one of the nyc airports operates on about a 15 minute schedule. Midway is more like 35 minutes.
- mota7 8y agoLooks like this is a re-hash of the data from https://www.oag.com/blog/billion-dollar-route https://www.oag.com/blog/billion-dollar-route
- rospaya 8y agoNo China locations, which is interesting. Are high speed trains dominating their domestic market?
- patio11 8y agoDefinitely the case in Japan at least; Tokyo to Osaka on the Shinkansen is a $150 or so ticket and gets on the order of 500k passengers a day.
- dredmorbius 8y agoThat, or fares are lower?
- rahimnathwani 8y agoThere are 10-15 high speed trains between each way per day Beijing and Shanghai (4.5 to 5.5 hour journey time). Planes are nominally faster (2.5 hours), start earlier (6:30am) and end later (last departure is ~10:30pm, whereas last fast train is ~7pm). There are several airlines serving that route, meaning planes leave roughly every half an hour, and tickets can be had for as little as $110 one way (more at more sane hours or if you buy closer to the date of travel). There are ~10,000 flights in each direction each year.
- paulcole 8y agoNominally means “in name only”. Did you intend to use a word with a different meaning? http://www.dictionary.com/browse/nominally http://www.dictionary.com/browse/nominally
- forkLding 8y agoNot surprised about the Vancouver to Toronto flights, its cheaper for me to fly from San Fran to Toronto and back versus flying from Vancouver to Toronto and back as indicated by my corporate flight expenses on Air Canada which usually have some kind of discount applied. This gets worse in the surge seasons when everyone is on holidays.
- pkaler 8y agoThis is unfortunately because Toronto is Air Canada's hub and Calgary is WestJet's hub. You can get directly to a few places from YVR. But eventually you have to fly through Calgary, Toronto, SFO, SEA, LAX, ORD, JFK, etc to get to many cities. http://www.yvr.ca/-/media/yvr/documents/air-services/destinations-brochure_2017_03.pdf?la=en http://www.yvr.ca/-/media/yvr/documents/air-services/destina...
- allcentury 8y agoWhat's the SF -> Newark connection I'm missing?
- dghughes 8y agoIn my tiny little part of the world it would take me 3 1/2 hours to drive 328km to Halifax. Or pay anywhere from $500 to $900 to fly the 180km as-the-crow-flies distance for a few minutes in the air. One flight flies 1,300km the wrong way then back, two connections, a a layover and then to Halifax for $1,100.
- sokoloff 8y agoEver considered learning to fly and flying it? Have any friends with airplanes that can drop you off?
- cm2012 8y agoFlying private airplanes is probably the most dangerous common thing you can do.
- namibj 8y agoAre there any small enough for the one-parachute-for-plane-and-contents technology that can go closer to the speed of sound (like, go about Mach .8 or so), and rely on pulling into stall to slow down enough for the parachute to deploy without ripping out it's part of the airframe? That should be much safer than the current way when operating small aircraft at speeds where that parachute could not deploy directly.
- dlgeek 8y agoSo, they're not nearly as fast as you're describing, but Cirrus does have parachutes on a lot of it's planes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_Airframe_Parachute_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_Airframe_Parachute_Syst...
- namibj 8y agoI know, the issue there is that if you deploy a parachute at over about Mach 0.4~0.5, you will either rip the airframe apart or reduce survival chances of large vertebrae due to the massive acceleration. The solution there would be going into a stall, as that usually serves to provide the drag needed to slow down to safe parachute speeds, but not so much that the airframe can't be reasonably build strong enough to not suffer damage that matters if one considers the plane scrap metal once it lands with the parachute. This is just too slow to get the main benefit of air travel, which is being able to go at barely subsonic speeds without handling being a massive headache. Of course you will have worse handling at barely subsonic speeds, due to any large deflection going transsonic and having the potential to result in loss of control. But that can easily be handled electronically, especially if the plane is at least somewhat aerodynamically stable, i.e. won't require constant corrections to not go into stall (like some modern fighter jets do).
- Havoc 8y agoBit stupid crunching it by revenue. Obviously the long routes generate the most rev, but they also have the highest fuel costs.
- sjtrny 8y agoSydney to Melbourne is #2 and is barely a 1 hour flight.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Havoc 8y agoEven a bad analysis can yield interesting datapoints
- bnegreve 8y ago> Obviously the long routes generate the most rev, No, why? If the trip is twice as short, airlines will be able to sell twice as many tickets per day. Considering the revenue per trip doesn't make much sense from their perspective.
- nashashmi 8y agohttp://www.anna.aero/2016/08/31/london-to-new-york-market-analysed/ http://www.anna.aero/2016/08/31/london-to-new-york-market-an... Number of passengers between London and New York
- Robotbeat 8y agoSounds like a good short-list of places where you might first build supersonic or hypersonic transport hubs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0 https://boomsupersonic.com/ https://boomsupersonic.com/
- caminante 8y agoThe article is critically flawed. This author is merely regurgitating another blog post [0], and wrongly, conflating profits with revenues. The original post didn't make the same representations. [0] https://www.oag.com/blog/billion-dollar-route https://www.oag.com/blog/billion-dollar-route
- disillusioned 8y agoIn fairness, only the headline uses "profit", and was conceivably changed by an editor. The Forbes article refers to it appropriately as revenue throughout.
- ksec 8y agoDoes makes $1 billion implies it has a profits or $1B, or could it also mean $1 billion revenue. I had a little thoughts about this the when commenting on Reddit revenue post, someone said make $1 billion means $1 billion profits. But I often sees Financial Newspaper refer Making x amount of money being revenue.
- caminante 8y agoMake (without context) is ambiguous because you don't know what's made.
- caminante 8y agoSee the "Revenue Per Hour" paragraph. The author uses earnings (not earned revenue), which implies income or profits.
- c3534l 8y agoThat difference makes the article rather uninteresting. It's clear that the highest grossing flights are just the ones which are the most common and most costly. In that kind of situation, airlines might even be competing as loss leaders: strategically operating at unprofitable levels in order to win market share and make up the difference on other flights travelers take. That is, there's a good chance in my mind that not only are these route not the most profitable, they could be the least profitable.
- abhinai 8y agoThis article talks about "routes" but only shows revenue by individual airlines. For example LAX <=> JFK has tons of different airlines flying between them while Qantas has near monopoly on SYD <=> MEL route (for corp travel, which is a big chunk). I'd much rather see overall revenues between destinations summed across all flights operating between them.
- jen729w 8y agoQantas is certainly the highest but no way you could describe it as a "near monopoly". Competition is very healthy indeed, even given that Jetstar is owned by Qantas.
- toomanybeersies 8y agoQantas does not have a "near monopoly". There's plenty of alternatives. However, Qantas is the preferred carrier for businesses though, so their tickets during the morning around 8 AM and early evening tend to be fairly expensive, as they are the most popular flights for business travelers.
- asfasgasg 8y agoBA tops the list at 1B revenue NYC to Heathrow. Virgin runs 80% as many flights on this same route, so they should be making in the ballpark of 800M revenue on that route. This is more than a number of other entrants on the list. So I can only assume that the metric on display is something other than what the title and blog post communicate. It is something like, - Select all airline-routes pairs. - Group by endpoints and airline. - Order by SUM(revenue) DESC. - Drop duplicate routes. That is, for any given route, they report the revenue of the highest revenue airline on that route. They select the top ten routes by the single airline making the most revenue on that route. This is an utterly zany metric and I can't imagine what use there is knowing it, but there you have it.
- sjg007 8y agoI want to know how BA gets away with their ridiculous fuel surcharges.
- nradov 8y agoThey get away with whatever customers are willing to pay for.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kolmogorov 8y agoSFO - FRA has to be incredibly profitable . Only Lufthansa and Unites fly it (codeshare partners ). Regular economy for the rest of the year is around 2300 USD round trip and closer to the flight it’s around 3500. It’s completely ridiculous compared to other more competitive routes like London.
- raverbashing 8y agoIs that price without any connections? Because I suspect that flight gets most of its passengers from connections.
- kolmogorov 8y agonor sure I understand the question. it's for a economy return flight (direct). funnily enough you can sometimes get a Lufthansa flight to Copenhagen for around 1000 and that connects through frankfurt. that's because copenhagen is more competitive from SFO. with carry-on that's a way to game the pricing but I heard they cancel the return if you don't check in in CPH.
- in_cahoots 8y agoI just checked and you can get a flight with a 2 hour layover for $500. I'm not sure why anyone would pay 3x the price unless their company is covering the cost.
- raverbashing 8y agoYes, that's what I meant (and you exemplified), they charge more for SFO-FRA than for a flight that has one of its legs as SFO-FRA And I suspect most of the passengers on SFO-FRA are from European connections and don't have FRA as their final destination (or initial origin)
- fyfy18 8y agoIn my experience inter-continental flights to and from the U.K. are often a lot cheaper than from mainland Europe. As an example, flying with Emirates to Dubai is often a few hundred euro cheaper from London that any other north and central European destinations they fly directly to.
- myrandomcomment 8y agoI would love to know SFO > Tokyo as I make the flight 1-2 times a month (Tokyo being a hub in some cases to the rest of Asia).
- cyberferret 8y agoI am flabbergasted that Qantas has the #2 slot for Melbourne-Sydney! No wonder players like Compass and OzJet tried to shoulder into that market (with little success) 10 or 20 years ago. I know of a couple of friends who live in one city and literally commute to the other every day/week for work, but I didn't realise how many people must to it daily to make this such a cash cow route.
- cylinder 8y agoIts the second busiest route in the world. It's a very easy flight, compared with driving and train, and is heavy with business travellers, hence the revenue. It could still use more services, the flights should be cheaper than they currently are.
- Reason077 8y agoIt’s not the second busiest by passenger numbers. All of the world’s busiest routes are in Asia. It’s the second “highest earning” in terms of fare revenue, however.
- ehrtt 8y agohttps://www.statista.com/chart/12598/the-worlds-busiest-air-routes/ https://www.statista.com/chart/12598/the-worlds-busiest-air-...
- cylinder 8y agoIt is number two in the world by total number of flights per year: http://www.traveller.com.au/worlds-busiest-airline-flight-routes-melbournesydney-now-worlds-second-busiest-h0e7ha http://www.traveller.com.au/worlds-busiest-airline-flight-ro... It's somewhere around #5 by total number of passengers.
- Reason077 8y agoIndeed. That’s because Qantas and their competitors use a large number of small aircraft on the route, maintaining a high frequency. If you look at the real busiest routes (by passenger count), like Singapore to KL, they tend to use larger wide body aircraft which carry a lot more passengers per flight.
- throw727272 8y agoI wonder if it makes sense to compare this to the Shinkansen route from Tokyo to Osaka.
- woodpanel 8y agoThe article has some intriguing detail: contrary to my bias, it seems to be that the routes with the most earnings are highly contested (and not the fringe ones with an immediate monopoly). But I wonder: has this more to do with a) existing demand and b) high optimization capacity (since the routes have dozens of flights/day and include at least one of the airline‘s hubs.
- Jaruzel 8y agoWhat would be more interesting to the layperson is the actual profit the airline makes per flight for each of the top routes. Is there any data on this anywhere?
- fyfy18 8y agoOne of the interesting data points not mentioned is these routes usually use larger aircraft like B747 (BA) and A380 (QF, EK). So the main reason why they are so profitable is primarily down to passenger numbers more than anything else.