Team Members: Aparna Calambur (ac987), Jack Schluger (jes543), Wanxing Lu (wl473)

From the perspective of an Airline company, what is the ideal price point of a domestic flight from point A to point B to maximize profit while staying competitive in the market given the competition?

This is an important question because the airline industry constitutes a significant force within the U.S. economy: according to the FAA, “Aviation accounts for more than 5% of our Gross Domestic Product.”¹ As an industry that many people rely on for work and personal means, domestic flights impact many people’s lives every day. Therefore, it is an vital task to understand how prices function within this industry: both to improve efficiency for these far reaching airlines—who will hopefully pass these savings on to consumers—and to help consumers understand pricing within the domestic flight market.

We hope to present findings that can help airlines price future flights, in addition to helping consumers decide when and where to fly to maximize a trip within their budget. Finally, we are likely to succeed in this because we have detailed historical data, and our intuition tells us there will be recurring patterns that we can learn with data science approaches to derive accurate predictions for future airfare prices between two cities at a specific time.

We plan on using datasets from the United States Bureau of Transportation which lists “Average Domestic Airline Itinerary Fares By Origin City”² from years 1993 to 2020, as well as online airfare trackers such as Fare Detective³, which provides historical pricing data on flights between any two airports within the United States.

These datasets will help us answer our question because they will provide us historical data on how airline tickets are priced at different times in the year. The United States Bureau of Transportation dataset will help give us an idea of how ticket prices change throughout the years and during different quarters within each year. The Faredetective website provides additional data on prices between specific airports and how prices compare across various booking websites.

1. https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/media/2016-economic-impact-report_FINAL.pdf
2. https://www.transtats.bts.gov/AverageFare/
3. https://www.faredetective.com/farehistory/