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I want to start with something that probably nobody in an airline boardroom wants to say out loud right now.

The fuel bill is not actually the biggest problem.

Yes, oil crossed $100 a barrel in March. 

Yes, jet fuel hit $209 a barrel in April before pulling back slightly. 

Yes, American Airlines is looking at a $400 million hit to first-quarter expenses alone, and United is internally planning for $175 oil holding through 2027. 

These numbers are real and they are serious.

However, the airlines that emerge from this period in a weaker position than their competitors will not have failed simply due to high fuel costs. They will have struggled as rising fuel prices exposed the operational inefficiencies and structural gaps that already existed within their organizations — issues they were neither tracking nor addressing effectively. That is what I want to talk about.

First, let's just acknowledge how bad this actually is

Frankly, it is bad. Genuinely bad in a way that takes a moment to sit with.

When Iran restricted the Strait of Hormuz at the end of February, roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne crude oil supply got disrupted overnight. Crude crossed $100 almost immediately. Jet fuel followed — and it followed harder, because refining constraints compounded the crude price spike in ways that hit aviation specifically.

Ticket prices are up nearly 15% year over year. Fuel surcharges on some Asia-Europe routes have more than doubled. ANA and Japan Airlines have pushed long-haul surcharges to around $370 per segment. Seoul to London went from $564 to over $4,000 in about two weeks, according to Google Flights data.

And Spirit Airlines — which was already struggling — ceased operations entirely on May 2nd.

That last one matters. Spirit did not fail simply due to high oil prices. The airline struggled as rising fuel costs exposed an operational structure with no room left to absorb the shock — thin margins, manual-heavy workflows, and no structural buffer. When the cost pressure hit, there was nothing underneath to support the business.

That is the pattern every mid-size carrier needs to be watching right now.

The thing about a fuel crisis is that it does not create problems. It reveals them.

Here is how this actually plays out inside an airline operations team.

Fuel costs jump. The finance team flags the exposure. Leadership looks for costs to cut everywhere else. And suddenly every operational inefficiency that was running quietly in the background — slow refund cycles, unaudited fare corrections, manual reconciliation workflows that nobody had ever questioned — is now a visible problem with a dollar figure attached to it.

The issue is that by the time you are looking for those problems under crisis pressure, you have already been losing money on them for months.

A refund that takes 12 days instead of 4. A fare update that moves through three manual approvals before it hits the system. A reconciliation cycle that catches discrepancies six weeks after the fact. None of these showed up as emergencies when fuel was at $80 a barrel. At $181 a barrel — which is where jet fuel is sitting right now, per IATA's Fuel Price Monitor — every one of those inefficiencies has a cost that was not there before.

This is exactly what Travel Bridge Services works on with LCC and regional carriers through its platform—fare audit, refund management, and NDC servicing. The work focuses on the critical processes that sit between what an airline should be collecting and what actually lands in the account. In a normal fuel environment, that gap is an inefficiency. In the current environment, it becomes a crisis.

The route disruption piece is making everything worse

There is a second cost layer here that is not getting enough attention in the broader conversation.

It is not just that fuel is more expensive per gallon. It is that airlines are burning significantly more of it per flight, because the airspace situation is forcing longer routes.

Middle East and Russia airspace closures are adding two to four hours to standard transcontinental routes. Europe to Asia. London to Mumbai. Frankfurt to Bangkok. For a widebody on a rerouted long-haul, that is an additional 8,000 to 15,000 liters of jet fuel per flight. Per flight.

Multiply that across a full schedule and you have a cost structure that looks nothing like the one that airline built its pricing around six months ago.

For network carriers trying to manage reconciliation across routes that are now completely different from the ones that were filed and priced — the revenue accounting complexity is significant. Fare structures do not automatically update when a route changes. ADM exposure increases. The back-office work compounds in ways that most teams are not staffed for under normal conditions, let alone this.

This is the specific problem that TBS Network addresses for full-service network carriers — revenue accounting coordination, reconciliation, fare audit management. The kind of structural operations support that becomes genuinely critical when route complexity and cost pressure are hitting simultaneously.

LCCs are the most exposed. Here is why.

The low-cost model is built on one thing: volume at thin margin. Strip out the premium cabin, maximize seat density, keep turnarounds fast, keep costs ruthlessly low. It works brilliantly when fuel is stable.

When fuel spikes 100 percent in three weeks, that model breaks in a very specific way. You cannot raise fares fast enough to cover costs without losing the price-sensitive passengers your whole model depends on. So you cut capacity to reduce exposure. But cutting capacity reduces revenue. Which makes the margins worse. Which forces more cuts.

Southeast Asian LCCs are already living this cycle right now. AirAsia and VietJet have cut seats by around 30 percent. Indonesia's Lion Air and Citilink, around 20 percent each. The fare increases they have implemented have not offset the cost burden — they have reduced load factors instead, which makes things worse not better.

This is not a Southeast Asia problem. It is a structural warning for any LCC or regional carrier that has not built genuine operational efficiency into how it runs — not just low costs, but fast, lean, audited workflows that do not leak revenue when margins compress.

What the carriers handling this better are actually doing differently

Worth saying clearly: it is not the biggest airlines doing best. It is the most operationally disciplined ones.

The carriers with high fuel hedge ratios are partially protected for now — some had 80 percent of expected fuel purchases hedged going into 2026. But hedges expire. And the carriers building structural advantages now are not banking on hedge coverage to save them.

What they are doing instead is a combination of four things.

Accelerating fleet renewal. New-generation aircraft burn 15 to 25 percent less fuel per seat than legacy jets. That is not a marginal improvement — at current fuel prices it is enormous. Airlines that had been slow-rolling fleet updates are now treating it as urgent.

Auditing every workflow for manual dependency. Every step that requires a human to touch something that could be automated is a cost that compounds under pressure. The airlines doing this seriously are not just looking for big automation wins — they are looking at the 14-step processes that could be 4 steps, and the approval chains that exist because nobody ever questioned them.

Connecting operations to revenue outcomes. This sounds obvious. It is not how most airlines are actually structured. Revenue management and operations are often separate conversations. The carriers changing this — building visibility so that an operations lead can see in real time what refund delays and reconciliation gaps are costing — are making faster, better decisions.

And using scalable operational infrastructure instead of trying to do everything internally. This is where partners like JR Technologies come in. Thomalex, their SaaS booking platform, gives TMCs, OTAs, and wholesalers the operational infrastructure to run leaner. And Travel Bridge Services wraps the human expertise around the operational side — so airlines are not just buying software but getting people who understand what aviation operations actually look like under pressure.

One more thing — and it is important

United Airlines is internally planning for oil at $175 a barrel not going back below $100 until end of 2027.

Read that again slowly.

This is not a pessimistic analyst model. This is what one of the world's largest airlines is actually using to make operational decisions right now. And aviation economists are backing that caution up — noting that even after geopolitical disruptions ease, refined fuel prices and airline fuel bills historically stay elevated for months while inventories rebuild and refining output recalibrates.

So the question every airline operations team needs to answer is not "how do we get through this spike." It is "what does our operation look like if this is the environment for the next 18 months."

The ones asking that question now, and building accordingly, are going to be in a fundamentally different position from the ones waiting for oil to come back down before they fix things.

Fuel is the headline. Operations is where the damage actually accumulates.

Expensive fuel does not create operational problems. It makes the ones you already have impossible to ignore. The refund cycles that were always slow. The reconciliation gaps that were always leaking. The manual workflows that were always one volume spike away from breaking.