We expect most airports submitting a Competition Plan to rely primarily on the summary data in Tables 1 and 2. While these tables do provide valuable information to be used in fare comparisons, highly summarized data does have some inherent shortcomings. Average trip length differences should be taken into account when making yield comparisons, as shorter trips justify a higher per-mile yield. For this reason, we recommend that direct comparisons between markets be restricted to those of similar average trip length. The summarized data in Table 2 also does not allow for comparisons of city-pairs with similar densities.
Economies of scale justify lower fares in extremely dense markets.
When comparing itself with other markets, an airport might note differences in the percentage of traffic traveling in low-fare markets. For airports interested in conducting more rigorous analyses, Table 3 supplies a complete list of all city-pair markets involving one of the qualifying large or medium airports. This information, combined with the list of competitors in each market found in Table 3, can help further refine an airport s efforts to identify the characteristics of markets with uncompetitive pricing. The carrier in each table is the reported ticketing carrier. A competitor is any carrier that held a ten percent or greater market share on a city-pair route during the period considered.