Air Travel Price War, who benefits?

MAS vs. AirAsia.

The two different pole on the magnet and both come from the same country. My country, Malaysia. MAS is Malaysia Airline System which has been the only airline that the country has which can be called internationally recognised (there are others but they mostly fly domestic) and then when AirAsia changed owner, MAS found themselves to be in competition for the same passengers. When an innovative CEO took over MAS by the name of Idris Jala, he came to loggerhead with the CEO of AirAsia, Tony Fernandes, who is an innovator himself and is affiliated to the Virgin group owner himself, Richard Branson. Recently, I was in a talk where Idris Jala reveal his turnaround strategy for MAS (he was appointed when MAS was losing money like nobody's business) and this July I will be in a talk where Tony will be the main speaker.

Surprisingly, the rivalry of MAS and AirAsia is not being questioned at all by the common people. The Parliamentarian in Malaysia did try to shake the boat with their request for AirAsia to be more nasionalised  but the people love them. What they get is cheap air travel which is a need nowadays. It started of with students and then small companies and then even the affluent executives used them nowadays. Not to be outdone, MAS intoduced their own type of savers package. Once known as Super Saver, the packages now allowed you to choose 5 type of packages. 

I, myself, always compare the prices both airlines have to offer before I buy airline tickets. Some have to do with timing and some have to do with what purpose is that travel. I have no preferences. I don't really care about the luxury or the comfort, especially when I need to get somewhere fast. Unless it is a long haul flight, which I rarely take nowadays. Even then, AirAsia now offers longhaul flights under its sister company, AirAsia X.

If you do travel around, you can now check out this site which tell us about the current trend of air travel, either the budget ones or the full board - airfare-now.com. They even has funny videos on the state of budget airlines nowadays which I found to be very funny.