Fly to Japan and ease your environmental conscience

Remember the question about the environmental impact of flying?  Air Genius Gary Leff puts it nicely:

If you’re pulling inventory out of a low fare bucket, the strong expectation is that there’s little effect at the margin on your buying the ticket because the airline expects to operate a flight that doesn’t come close to filling up.

If you’re pulling inventory out of a high fare bucket, for coach fares at the extreme end if you’re traveling on a Y fare, you can pretty much expect that the flight will be close to sold out and that the airline is willing to risk displacing another passenger in the short term in exchange for your higher fare… or at least that the ticket cost is high enough to potentially influence behavior on the part of the airline...

Reality is even a little bit more complicated than that. Cargo has to come into play, too. Regardless of what you pay and what fare class you’re booking in, your travel on United between San Francisco and Nagoya, Japan is going to have almost no effect whatsoever on United’s decision-making. They’ve got a very large contract with Toyota and they fill up their 747 with cargo and the flight goes out with very low load factors yet is still profitable for them to operate.

Getting a frequent flyer seat also means that your environmental impact is likely very small.  I am pleased, of course, that I often have Gary booking my seats for me, all in the interests of a cleaner Earth.  The bottom line is that if you get a good deal on price, you should feel doubly good about it.