> and there's enough competition to force them to pass that on as reduced prices

i found the bug.

Cynicism aside, air travel is one of the industries with pretty healthy levels of competition. (At least in Europe and South East Asia. I haven't spent much time in North America, so can't judge the market there.)

People love to hate eg RyanAir, but their effect on prices is felt throughout the industry; even if you never take a single RyanAir flight.

Yeah they pass those cost saving right onto record corporate profits for the last 20 years...

Huh? Airlines are notorious for being bad for investors.

(And even without looking up any data, I find your 'record profits for the last 20 years' hard to square with my memories of covid.)

EDIT: I tried to find some indices for airlines. The closest I found was https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/JETS/performance/ which didn't exactly have a stellar performance.

So I'm not sure where you get your claim from?

I wasn't referring to airlines specifically. I see how I was unclear now. We are in a decade+ era of record corporate profits yet incomes are stagnate and costs are rising.

Airlines are weird. I think warren buffet said something about airlines being the most complicated way to guarantee losing money as a business or something like that once.