If you want to travel across the pond to Europe, you may have noticed that prices have become ridiculous. I’m in Detroit, so I’ll use our prices. A round trip ticket to London runs from $1000-1500, right now Kayak has tickets for $1295, if you fly a month from now.
Now what this new upstart company, Norwegian Air International, is offering is cheaper flights to Europe, in some cases by $500. Now to consumers this would be a win win situation, because it would drop all ticket prices, at least by a little. Of course the companies don’t want that, but I’m a bit surprised by the unions, even though it is probably about pay or something. But still, messed up.
So these companies, Delta, American and United along with the unions are trying to have Congress hold up the approval process, which actually goes against treaties and laws that we have with the EU, even though Norway isn’t part of the EU the airline got Irish approval to be “based” in Ireland, which is part of the EU. While that is all sneaky, and what not, a free market demands that competition isn’t hindered, maybe not helped, but definitely not hindered.
So dear Congress, stop holding up the approval process.
(As a side note: If you want to fly to Nairobi, Kenya, which comes with a stop in Europe, London, Paris, or Amsterdam the price right now, same dates, is $1515, so if you say that it costs $1295 to go to London, which is around 3700 miles, then the trip from London to Nairobi costs only $220. But the weird thing comes when you look at the distance from London to Nairobi which is a distance of 4200 miles, which begs the question of how much the trip to London should actually be. There is a more direct flight to Nairobi, with less stops, for $1762, but even with that the math is odd.)