Who Really Pays For Your Cheap Flight?
In September 2025, I log into social media. My algorithm advertises a $137 Iberia Airlines flight from the US to Spain. The fare is crazy cheap. I can’t even fly to visit my family within the continental US for $137. I know I’m not the only one whose hand is twitching to click.
But $137 is also conspicuously cheap. It is an obvious effort to keep encouraging international travel (and capital) in the turbulent contrails of a Spanish summer boiling hot with both a record number of foreign tourists and domestic-led anti-tourism movements. Sitting in the middle of this stand-off are these mass cheap flights, like those of Iberia, that are funding, fueling, and accelerating profound consequences on the peninsula.