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.

 

[jb747]

Reduced overall capacity, so no need to discount? I'm looking at next year too, and the pricing is pretty depressing.

 

[lameyofth]

The sale is not for the whole plane seats. It's just for some limited seats. So as the sale seats are fully booked, the prices for the remaining seats will go back to normal. SQ do have these type of sales regularly though.

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