Flight Prices around the World

s class= "wpsal-anchor" id="ranking" name="ranking">About the rankings

When it comes to prices, the subject of airports never gets old. Over the last 12 month, there have been many changes in the aviation industry, from Norwegian Air's new stellar position to British Airway's recent trip to the budgetary world. Now you can research your flight screen-free via Amazon Alexa or Google Home when carriers use AI.

The distance between the front and back of the aircraft is increasing, with the big carriers introducing a base economics category (which we believe is nearer to the beef category) and charging for everything from baggage to seating. One thing is certain: the route from A to A has never been so rich in selection, bewilderment and mayhem - and comparing fares has never been so onerous.

In order to better appreciate the added value for the world' s airline clients, we have come back to what we like the most: tough facts. Five million points to get a glimpse of world prices (in US$ per km) for multinational and national carrier. Our aim was to get an idea of the world' s least costly airline companies and the least costly - and most costly - country to which we are travelling.

Naturally, air fares are following certain trend; longer journeys are costing more, and some carriers are more costly per kilometre travelled than others. We have noticed slight changes in our prices and our ratings since our 2016 Annual Review. Generally speaking, the lower end of both the national and the global costs per kilometre ranks has moved.

Unfortunately, as air fares have tended to rise, mainly due to higher petrol prices, this may be a continuing upward tendency. Scoot is no longer one of the lowest priced airlines and is falling sharply in our global ranking (from number 1 in 2016 to number 31 in 2018), with the mean cost per kilometre rising from 0.07 to 0.12 US dollars.

Travelers to and from Asia, however, still have many great value choices to make, with our airlines getting on at places #1, #2 and #3 to get you the farthest for your dollars. Further highlights are Primera Air (4th place in the ranking ), a relatively new actor in the cost-effective long-haul revolutionary.

Located mainly between Scandinavia and Europe's vacation spots, the carrier has begun to expand to low-cost routes from Europe to North America. Ryanair is (not surprisingly) also at the top of the league for Europeans, with a price per kilometre of 0.10 US dollars, which is similar to some of the cheapest airlines in Asia.

Dominant of the EU fleets and aggressively focused on low-cost flights, the short-haul operator has made a headline in recent years by reducing costs with its novel - and sometimes radically - approach. Easyjet, Europe's other major funding agency, surprisingly comes much higher (at 0.19 USD/km) - and Southwest, the US major funding agency, at 0.29 USD/km, is almost three fold as high as the costs per km of Ryanair, which shows that the importance of "budget" can strongly differ on different sides of the lake.

Oman Air, Kuwait Air, Royal Brunei Airlines and Gulf Air Bahrain all have comprehensive routes and destinations and fly in at the same or similar costs/kilometres. Which is the world' s least expensive carrier? Drumroll... Chile won the prize for the best priced nation (Nepal is the highest), but it's Australia's Tiger Air that clears the ground with its US$0.06/km costs, probably because of the long distance it travels.

After years of poor media (she was named Australia's poorest carrier three years in a row), she was purchased by Virgin in 2014, who apparently changed her fate. We don't often say that, but sometimes the lowest can be the best! Sometimes carriers have very unconventional tariffs for purchase requests, which is why for this purpose we have only taken into account tariffs that were within double the lowest available rate for each purchase request.

Like earlier posts in this issue, our analyses are meant to be the beginning of a discussion, not a final conclusion about price tendencies or the place of a particular carrier in a particular hacking order. Flight costs depend on many different variables, such as how closely the flight is booked and how popular the itinerary is.

Posted by Ellie Cobb with dataset by Richard Fothergill. Our multimodal door-to-door journey finder provides return routing for flights, trains, coaches, ferries, commuter services and journeys to and from any destination using a dedicated library of routing, frequencies and price information for approximately 750,000 journeys from over 4,800 carriers in 144 states.