Typically twice a month, I fly from San Jose to San Diego. The route sells out incredibly ahead of time, so all the cheap seats are sold months in advance on Southwest. No other airline is really an option, except American, but they have less flexible flight times.
That typically leaves me buying a full fare Southwest ticket, which are $107.00 each way. Tack on the “Security Fee”, “PFC” and “Taxes”, the ticket comes to $234.20. San Diego and San Jose are about 700 (?) miles from each other, so it comes to roughly $0.17/mile. As I blogged about a while ago, I got my tickets from SFO to EWR for $276.70. The flight is 2500 miles, giving us a rocking $0.06/mile on Continental!
Flying on Continental feels so much more like a real airline than Southwest. On my way to New Jersey, I watched part of Chasing Liberty and I’m watching The Big Bounce on the plane right now. In this segment, we were served Cape Cod Reduced Fat Chips (only potatoes, canola oil, and salt!), Pepperidge Farms Milano Cookies and sandwiches. Pretty impressive, I thought, for an airline in an industry that is generally headed south. Having assigned seats is also a simple pleasure that I’d forgotten about, not to mention enough overhead baggage space to accommodate all the passengers.