Rome2rio serves millions of queries a month for travel involving flights across the world. As a result, we get a detailed picture of the range of airfares for flights presented by airlines to a very global audience.
NB: This is a viewpoint by Rome2Rio chief operating officer Michael Cameron and data scientist Richard Fothergill.
To better understand the value for customers offered by the world's airlines, we studied the price per kilometre travelled for flights displayed on the site.
We previously reported on the world’s cheapest airlines at the end of 2012. Now we are updating that fascinating report with our 2016 Global Flight Price Ranking.
Here are the 25 most popular airlines on Rome2rio and the median price per kilometre for their fares:
Unsurprisingly, the top positions are held by low-cost international carriers servicing the Asia Pacific region: Scoot, Jetstar, Tiger and AirAsia.
Here in Australia, prices line up with our perception of the premium carried by different brands:
Qantas is the incumbent national carrier. Virgin Australia came into the Australian market in 2000 as a disruptive budget alternative but has since come to compete head-to-head with Qantas.
Regional Express stands out for being far more expensive than the others per kilometre. In this case, it’s not necessarily because of brand premium: they run a turboprop fleet with fewer seats per aircraft servicing more remote destinations than the other carriers.
The top of the ranking is occupied by low cost airlines such as Frontier and Spirit, but we noticed that the US flights were generally more expensive per kilometre than the Australian ones.
What then are the cheapest countries for domestic flights? The five cheapest countries for domestic travel all lie (at least partially) in the continent of Asia, with two of the top three (Thailand and Indonesia) in Southeast Asia:
The ranking of countries for domestic flights fits nicely with our world ranking of airlines - the cheapest airlines overall were mostly based out of Southeast Asia.
A complete breakdown of carriers for each major country can be found here.
We put together the 2016 Global Flight Price Ranking using airfares displayed on Rome2rio in January and February 2016. Rome2rio serves over eight million visitors per month with a global user base spanning Europe, Americas and Asia Pacific, so our pricing data covers hundreds of airlines and millions of tickets.
We only studied economy fares. Airlines sometimes offer highly non-competitive fares for shopping queries, so for this analysis we included only fares that fell within two times the cheapest price available for each shopping query.
The Global Flight Price Ranking gives insight into the brand premium carried by airlines for international flights across the globe and for domestic carriers in each region.
How well does the ranking stack up for your perception of the airlines in your country?
NB: This is a viewpoint by Rome2Rio chief operating officer Michael Cameron and data scientist Richard Fothergill.
NB2: Image by Barun Patro/FreeImages.com