Major legacy carriers in April upped minimum-stay requirements on some routes in an attempt to drive more revenue and push business travelers into higher fare buckets.
Northwest Airlines said it rolled back some such fare restrictions on routes where it competes with US Airways, which did not match the change, but that American Airlines, Continental Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines further restricted minimum-stay requirements on some routes, particularly where low-cost carriers do not compete.
Northwest said growing fuel costs are spurring airlines to seek new revenue opportunities in every corner. "Every network carrier is faced with extraordinarily high fuel costs and the need to find ways to offset that burden," said Jim Cron, Northwest senior vice president of revenue management. "However, without widespread acceptance of these kinds of revenue enhancements, including very strategic segmentation of fares, we cannot sustain the increases across the board and remain competitive. We will continue to look for other ways to increase revenues, in light of these record fuel costs."
Northwest raised minimum stays from zero or one night to two nights on many fares, while raising two-night minimum-stay fares to three.
Airfare analysis conducted by Harrell Associates for Business Travel News confirmed some of those restrictions had taken hold. Evaluating nearly 3,000 fares on 300 routes for the same week that Northwest announced the policy change in April, U.S. airlines placed minimum-stay requirements on 24 percent of domestic roundtrip tickets. Though the number is up only slightly from the 22 percent for the same period last year, airlines have upped the number of days required for the fare.
While the number of one-day-stay fares slipped from 7 percent to 5 percent in April this year compared with last, and fares necessitating a two-day stay remained flat at 5 percent, fares requiring a three-day stay rose from 6 percent to 9 percent. Likewise, fares requiring a Saturday-night stay grew from 3 percent last year to 5 percent.
Several domestic carriers earlier this year said they had reinstituted Saturday-night stay requirements in select markets, though the efforts were not matched en masse
(BTNonline, Feb. 4).