it's cheaper because more and more jobs require constant travel so they have much more of the good predative revenue. for example at work I've never seen a 300 mile trip for less than 350. ever. let alone the la-Chicago for 100 they mention in the article. that would look like a bug in my employee's booking system.
what they get from the rest is just icing.
so, convince yourself of that lie all you want. but the system continues to be awful and inefficient. only the demand changed. to their advantage.
You're not looking very hard, and you're seeing discount hub connections. It's incredibly easy to get a 600$+ ticket for that many miles. [I'm not talking about business or first class tickets.] The cheapest you can go is about $60 on advanced LA-SFO OW tickets. (Outside of Southwest or the discount flights).
How far ahead and what days are you traveling and how many days apart is your start and return trip. I fly RDU -> SFO regularly. If I'm 21 days out and my trip is 3 days or more I can get it for $500 - $600. If I reduce it to 2 nights it goes up to nearly $1000. So "cheap" tickets still exist but they're much harder to find than they used to be.
it's cheaper because more and more jobs require constant travel so they have much more of the good predative revenue. for example at work I've never seen a 300 mile trip for less than 350. ever. let alone the la-Chicago for 100 they mention in the article. that would look like a bug in my employee's booking system.
what they get from the rest is just icing.
so, convince yourself of that lie all you want. but the system continues to be awful and inefficient. only the demand changed. to their advantage.