The real cost of air travel continues to go down as customers really only discriminate on price. Airlines have tried before to compete on other facets but everything failed.

The best you can do is look at specific carriers, and more importantly specifically what aircraft you'll be flying on.

A cross country flight in economy is going to be more comfortable in a Delta A220 than a United 737 Max. However, because of hubs and lack of competition many non-mega metros don't really have a large amount of choice.

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datakan 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Maybe, I don't know. Sprit Airlines closing up abruptly like it did may refute your premise. They were the cheapest of the cheap, people hated them and now they are gone.

	▲	richwater 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		As the country exited COVID, mainline carriers began to really push their basic and barebones fares which directly took away business from ULCCs like Spirit. Spirit never really leveraged their credit cards effectively to help subsidize the cost of seats. ULCCs thrive when they can maximize their time in the sky across as many different flights as possible. Filling up the day with many different flights allows them to rake in checked-baggage fees, reserved seat fees etc more often than longer mainline carrier flights. All of this went out the window when a large portion of their A320 fleet was grounded because of the P&W engine issues. This absolutely killed their utilization percentage. Spirit died way more because of business management than it did because customers didn't choose on price.