What's the deal with 2025 EU early bird sale?

[SCM]

Howdy

I've been overseas, but this September like clockwork, the early bird sale for 2025 Europe dropped. For context, in the last several years, I've managed to pick up return J flights for 5.6k in 2022, then 5.9k in 2023, and finally 6k in 2024 - covering various airports (usually some combination of FRA, AMS and BRU). The dates were always around March-June (somewhere in between).

This time around, I was very surprised that the lowest prices I could find to those airports and a few others were about 8.3k return. The level of discounting here has never been so bad, or call it inflation - whatever you like.

Does anyone have any thoughts about this? I actually thought that travel demand was cooling off due to various reasons (end of revenge travel, high cost of living in general, unemployment going up worldwide - however good it still is, etc), so I really was not expecting this.

 

[Mattg]

Some airlines have offered J fares to Europe around the 6k mark during this year's Europe early bird sale, but not SQ.

With the LH sale, for example, you could get J return to Europe for around the $6-7k mark, with SQ flights in/out of Australia.