Ahh yes. The economically ignorant excuse to raise the price of XYZ.
The truth is that airline fairs are pretty inelastic. Airfare search engines list prices in order, and yes an $1 difference in tickets can make a difference.
Perhaps the higher cost of aircrews can be sustained by higher airfares, but that isn’t the call of regional management anyway. Even WOs don’t control their ticket prices, though they may have more input. Other FFDs have almost no input in ticket prices. They compete against each other and yes, ever penny counts and can make a difference between winning a contract and getting more flying and losing a contract and seeing flat growth or a decrease in flying. That results in long upgrades which... well, how do long upgrade times play in the regional industry? New hires don’t give a crap about contracts and pay. They care about upgrade time: