While reviewing the 10am EDT U.S. Domestic and Canadian airfare feed this morning — looking for airlines that might match the Northwest Airlines airfare sale to smaller cities last night, I noticed Continental Airlines had a huge number of airfare decreases.

I thought this was odd because they normally would only MATCH the Northwest Airlines airfare sale to smaller cities (not EXTEND it).

Upon closer review, Continental did match the limited airfare sale in overlapping routes — additionally however they removed their $7 each-way ($14 roundtrip) fuel surcharge on thousands of city pairs.

Previously Continental had set its U.S. Domestic/Canada fuel surcharges to expire for travel departing after the 20th of August (by rule on each fare) for thousands of city pairs. They had filed these surcharges earlier this summer as part of a series of 3 attempted airfare increases which mostly stuck on the major airlines.

I had expected them to update their surcharge rules to a new future travel expiry date the past few weeks, not to suddenly remove the surcharge rule altogether.

Continental in the past has had some difficulties filing their fuel surcharges, so I am trying to confirm with them if this is intentional or another one of their “difficulties”.

I can’t imagine this is a mistake because it has gone on for a few days now — this means for the past few weeks (for travel departing after 20th August) tens of thousands of Continental U.S. Domestic/Canada tickets sold at $14 roundtrip discount compared to travel departing earlier in the summer.

Dropping the fuel surcharges is the equivalent of a airfare sale of $7 each way which must be causing other airlines some heartburn trying to match them.

I checked Continentals hub cities, Houston, Newark and Cleveland and they continue to have the $14rt fuel surcharges, so although this is in thousands of city pairs, it doesn’t look to be on their most lucrative non-stop routes.

The Big Question

Is this an “hidden” airfare sale? Summer Time Only Hike? or reaction to Matt Lauer’s Powder Puff Interview of the Continental CEO yesterday? or is it truly a sign that fuel surcharges are going to go lower in the coming months.

My hope for all air travel consumers is the latter.

The ramifications of fuel surcharges beginning to drop especially if this begins to creep into International trans-oceanic flights is significant. These fuel surcharges are running between $120 and $180 round trip…

Update (3:02pm CDT)

We called, emailed and faxed Continental to ask them about this removal of Domestic fuel surcharges. Mary Clark in the Corporate Communications Department of Continental Airlines responds:

“As a matter of policy, we don’t comment on pricing.”

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I have heard some rumblings that US Airways did some fuel surcharge reductions which might be the cause — I just reviewed the past weeks airfare filings (15 of them) and there does not appear to be any significant activity on US Airways this past week.