On Wednesday, 25th March, the Philippine Department of Transportation (DOTr) announced that airlines are getting ready to compress flights whilst the Philippine government works to curtail its travel expenses in the face of the ongoing armed conflict in West Asia.

It isn’t just the Philippines, of course; the way fuel prices have been shooting up since 28th February has every nation on the planet worried about their respective supplies and reserves, especially where transportation is concerned.

As of press time, it is the world’s airlines who are getting the most criticism as the related issues of fuel supply and pricing compounded by the safety of regional aerospace led to the implementation of practices which many people from regulators to consumers find excessive, if not absolutely exploitative.

Virtually every carrier, both full-service and low-cost, has pointed out that prices for the average plane ticket have gone up thanks to the ongoing conflict and the resulting fuel shortage.

Thus, we have to ask: are airlines taking advantage of the current situation and placing burdens on the public, or are these circumstances unavoidable in the face of the ongoing crisis?

Costs to be borne

The term daylight robbery has been thrown at airlines the world over thanks to the way the average ticket price has risen by a factor of ten in recent weeks.

On 3rd March, Julie Zhu reported via Reuters that airfare took a serious spike upward in the days immediately following the initial strike on Iran.

Think about it: in the days before that first attack, an Economy Class plane ticket for the London-Sydney route cost about £786; after 28th February, the airline began charging passengers £1,900 per.

Airline executives often chalk up such hikes to the surge in fuel prices and even the need to reroute flights into safer paths, but it should also be noted that a number of global airlines are using advanced artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools to implement dynamic pricing, essentially fares dictated by the overall situation, as well as standing fuel supply.

Critics have pointed out that these tools’ algorithms sift through personal data to find the highest price a customer would be willing to pay out of the desperation to head home or to seek the closest safe haven.

No refunds?!?

Another bone that consumer advocates have to pick with airlines is the way passengers are discouraged from claiming refunds even when circumstances call for such repayment.

As a way of placating customers, some airlines try to offer travel vouchers travellers can use for another booking; but some have pointed out that this is more of a ploy to help aviation firms maintain cash liquidity.

This, of course, has not flown well with regulators, particularly in the United States where airlines have been strong-armed into returning more than US$3 billion in withheld refunds since 2022.

Some airlines have challenged such decisions, citing how they cannot afford to award refunds in the face of ongoing fleet or route expansion initiatives, though many regulators have advised them to simply pay up.

Doing right by the people

This is not to say, of course, that the matter is a stalemate between airlines and regulators.

On the contrary, governments the world over are implementing measures to protect consumers from price-gouging in the face of the crisis.

The Philippines, for example, is working to offset the financial burden of higher plane fares by reducing a number of fees currently being charged by airport management companies and related service providers.

India, on the other hand, periodically implements airfare ceilings as a way of mitigating fare spikes whenever crises come up; to be fair, these are lifted once operations return to a more or less normal state.

Likewise, governments the world over have proposed over the past several years to implement stricter rules on operational disclosure among airlines, ensuring that pricing remains transparent regardless of whether or not a crisis is ongoing, along with improvements to refund processing.

In any case, the world is watching, and airlines would do well to pay attention as, even in the face of conflict, people need to get to where they have to go.