If you are thinking about booking your summer holiday, now would be a good time. The price of airline tickets, already higher since the start of the war in Iran, is nowhere near where it needs to be if a prolonged disruption to jet fuel supplies looms.
So far, the industry’s reaction to a near-doubling in the price of jet fuel — which like so many essential commodities depends on passage through the Strait of Hormuz — has been tepid. There’s no single number that captures plane ticket prices, but Lufthansa reckons customers who booked flights for April after the war began paid 12 per cent more per kilometre than those who bought before. Demand has nonetheless held up. Major carriers have announced only a smattering of schedule cuts.
Airlines have managed to avoid greater turbulence because jet fuel hasn’t actually run short — yet. For weeks after the conflict began, cargoes that had left the Middle East prior to the closure of the Strait continued to arrive, and stored products made up the slack. That will not be true for much longer: in Europe, for instance, Goldman Sachs estimates commercial jet fuel stocks could fall to the International Energy Agency’s critical 23-day threshold by the end of May.