How much does it cost to fly out of LAX?
Authors: Diane Jang (Project Lead), Arjun Pawar, Johan Chua, Junwon Choi, Chloe Florit
Introduction
Winter break is upon us. A month or two ago, you may have found yourself in an exciting conversation with friends or family about the beautiful places you can visit over the holidays. Some of you may have opened your laptops right away to find travel deals. “Where are you going?” the website asks. You type in Seattle, New York, or any other location you would want to spend your last of 2022 in. You click “Search,” and lists of flight tickets pop up on your screen with bolded prices on the right. A number of you probably closed your laptop at this point.
With COVID-19 getting under control and travel restrictions being lifted, more and more people are looking into traveling as a way to destress and visit the places they wanted to but couldn’t over the past couple years. However, various socioeconomic factors, such as inflation and international conflict, makes flight fares unpredictable. Our team thought it would be interesting to take a look at historical flight fare data and analyze trends in prices as well as the most popular destinations and airlines used by travelers.
Data Processing
The data used in this article was provided by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (https://www.transtats.bts.gov/DL_SelectFields.aspx?gnoyr_VQ=FHK&QO_fu146_anzr=b4vtv0%20n0q%20Qr56v0n6v10%20f748rB). Flight data from each quarter from 2018 to 2022 were merged through MySQL. Data was filtered to only include LAX as the origin airport.
Current trends in flight fares
With the processed data, we first visualized the average market fare for each of the destination airports through an interactive map. This map allows readers to select the years and quarters of flight data they want to see and view the distribution of average market fare per flight across the United States. When hovering over a circle marker on the map, a pop-up box shows the destination state, city and airport of the flight, as well as the average market fare and average distance flown from LAX. The circle markers are also color-coded to show the range of flight fares. One noticeable trend is that average flight fares increase as the average distance flown from LAX increases, but the market fares are especially pricier for popular destinations such as New York and Atlanta.
Flight fare change over time
One of our major objectives was to visualize how COVID-19 affected the annual average flight fares. The visualization above shows variation in average flight fares from 1995 to 2022; overall, prices have generally decreased since 1995.
There was a significant drop in prices between 2019 and 2021, which was when COVID-19 was most prevalent and the airline industry was most affected. A sharp increase with the same magnitude could be observed between 2021 and 2022, which was when COVID-19 levels began dropping and traveling restrictions were lifted. We may also attribute this recent rebound in prices to the possibility of flight demands increasing with flight users recovering from COVID-19 and the transfer of virtual to in-person events. Although we may expect prices to stabilize again, with fuel prices increasing globally, we may also anticipate a continued upward trend in flight fares in the coming months.
Flight fare variation by quarter
We also thought it would be interesting to determine if there is a change in flight prices from quarter to quarter. The year 2019 was the best year to look at since flight fares were not impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. We can notice that the first and the fourth quarters were the highest with average flight fares of about $331 and $316. These high prices are due to the holidays (Christmas in quarter 4 and New Year’s in quarter 1).
In the years 2020 and 2021, we noticed the effects of the pandemic on flight fares. Quarters 2, 3, and 4 of 2020 and quarter 1 of 2021 have record low average flight prices.
Flight Fares by Airlines
In the world of flying, we often find the same flight route being offered by different airlines. This begs the question: from the flights departing from LAX, which airline is the cheapest? To find this, the flights of the nine most popular airlines (accounting for 79.29% of trips from LA) were analyzed — the price per mile was calculated for each individual flight and the results were graphed on a box plot.
From the graph, we see that Spirit Airlines is far cheaper than the rest of the pack with a median price per mile of just $0.036! The next seven airlines, with prices three to four times greater than Spirit’s, share almost identical median costs ranging between $0.10 to $0.13, and SkyWest finishes the group with the high price per mile of $0.18. Looking closer at the middle seven, we see that Alaska Airlines, Delta Airlines, and Envoy Air share the largest IQRs of the group (meaning they have the widest price range of the group), and JetBlue and PSA have the smallest IQRs. Thus, after Spirit Airlines, JetBlue and PSA are by far the next two cheapest airlines (with their low medians and small IQR relative to the middle seven).
However, price isn’t the only factor a traveler must consider when choosing an airline, flight availability and scheduling flexibility matters too. Thus, it’s also important to analyze the popularity of these nine competing airlines.
From the bar chart, it is clear that American Airlines dominates the market for flights departing LAX with a whopping 40.8% market share. American Airlines’ closest rivals are Delta and Alaska; but even then, their combined percent share only equals half of American’s. Thus, from this graph, it becomes clear that LAX’s domestic flight market is controlled by four major airlines: American, Delta, Alaska, and JetBlue. Diving deeper, LAX actually serves as a hub for the top three companies, which strongly supports the trend that’s been revealed.
Thus, when choosing a domestic airline to fly out of LAX with, one should choose Spirit if they’re after low prices and American if they’re prioritizing flight flexibility.
Flight Fares by Destination
In our exploration of flight fares, we thought it would also be necessary to consider the flight destination state as a factor that influences the fare. Intuitively, flights to popular holiday destinations, buzzing industrial destinations, or remote destinations would be costlier than other routes. We wanted to determine if there were any patterns in the market fares across destination states.
Different states in the US are bound to influence the fare in combination with other factors such as how frequently airlines fly into and out of the state, how many airports are there in the state, how important the state is for trade/commerce or vacations, and so on…
We decided to take an approach to this investigation in which we checked for the existence of any patterns in market fares by looking at the top 10 most popular states. This helped us observe fares in the most-popular states which were determined based on the sheer number of transactions recorded in the dataset. These visualizations were done on violin plots, which gave us a snapshot of the averages, ranges and distributions of our market-fare variable. These also show the general region in which market fares for that destination were recorded. The result is as shown in the figure below:
The top 10 popular states all had medians between $150 and $250. The most expensive state was Hawaii, which could be explained by various reasons such as Hawaii being a tourist destination or being relatively far away from the US mainland. The distributions were fairly identical with the occasional outliers in each category. The overlay of the dotted line also shows if the medians correlated with how far the airports were from LAX. Georgia and Massachusetts were anomalies, as seen above. There is no definitive connection between the distance and the fare so we can say other confounding variables must have come into play here. Overall, we can conclude that popular destinations which happen to be farthest from LAX (i.e. on the East Coast and far into the Pacific) such as Massachusetts, New York and Hawaii had the costliest tickets.
Link to code
The code used for this project can be found here: https://github.com/datares/F22-team-bruinair
