Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Tuesday the 20th of May.

I've been looking at some extremely high fares. They are pretty much universally going from London airports and from Manchester to Bilbao in Spain.

In the next 24 hours, that of course is because of the Europa League

final between Tottenham Hotspur, London team and Manchester United. But I've also been looking

at some very extreme fares on British airways between London and Edinburgh. And there's nothing special. There's no

particular high demand event. These are middle of the day flights and they are selling for

preposterous amounts. Over £1,800 return in some cases.

That will buy you a business class seat,

but frankly for a flight of barely an hour,

that's not much comfort.

You might think this is a terrible example of egregious behaviour by British Airways,

but actually there's more to it than that, as I've been hearing

from the airline and airport economist Oliver Ranssen.

When we see a fair like this, Simon, the reality is that the airline don't even want to sell

that seat. At least they don't want to sell it to a passenger going from London to Edinburgh.

What they want to do instead

is they want to ensure that the seat is held back for a more profitable, more valuable passenger,

somebody on the long haul network. And this is practiced by airlines, well-managed airlines,

all over the world. Not great for consumers, of course, but great for the airline accounts at the

end of the year, because they can ensure that they, by holding seats back for long haul passengers

who provide thousands of pounds to the long haul network, they can earn as much revenue as

possible, not just from one flight to Edinburgh, but from all of their flights everywhere.

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