Today is National Cheap Flight Day. This unofficial holiday marks the end of the summer travel boom and celebrates the typical drop in airfare that coincides with the end of summer.
While National Cheap Flight Day is effectively a marketing ploy by the travel industry, it is true that airline tickets can fall by as much as 20% as summer wraps up and kids return to school.
Prices usually ramp back up again ahead of Thanksgiving and the rest of the holiday travel season. But how cheap is it to fly to Pennsylvania and the other U.S. states?
PennStakes.com took a break from covering sports betting and PA online casinos to see how the Keystone State compares to other states in terms of flight prices.
Using data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, we ranked the states and the District of Columbia based on approximate average domestic airline itinerary fares by origin city for 2022 and the first quarter of 2023. The Bureau of Transportation’s airfares are reported based on individual cities, and obviously the cities within a given state are of varying sizes. We averaged the fares by city, then arranged them by state, to arrive at our numbers.
As you can see, Pennsylvania ranks as the 19th least expensive state to fly to in America, with the average in-bound domestic flight costing $438 (this includes both round trips and one-way flights).
This is about in line with a Forbes study from 2023 that puts the price of an average domestic flight in the United States at $378, and the average fare for a domestic round trip at $427.
The state’s biggest airport, Philadelphia International (PHL), welcomed more than 25.2 million passengers in 2022. Of those, more than 22 million were domestic arrivals. While both figures are up significantly from 2021, total passengers arriving at PHL is still down over 23% from its pre-pandemic numbers in 2019.
If you happen to be booking a cheap flight to Pennsylvania to catch one of the state’s many professional sports teams, PennStakes.com has you covered with PA sportsbook promo codes.
Author
Jeff Parker is an entertainment writer for PennStakes.com. A writer for film, television and the internet, Jeff is a life long movie buff, with a Masters Degree in Popular Culture. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he works full time as documentary filmmaker and producer.
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