Hacker News Reader

Comment by cheschire | Hacker News Reader

> In 1957, a one-way ticket cost £85 (equivalent to £2,589 in 2023), rising to £145 by 1973 (equivalent to £2,215 in 2023).

Oof that really puts inflation into perspective doesn’t it?

View on HN

£2,589 for an all-inclusive 50-day bus-cruise, even today, doesn't seem that overly expensive. (~£50/day).

So it's not just inflation, it's "that used to be cheaper".

I guess on the flipside, travelling by plane in 1957 (or even 1974), would have been much more than £2,589.

> travelling by plane in 1957 (or even 1974), would have been much more [expensive]

Not to mention a lot more dangerous.

Hmm. A long trip by a 1957 bus vs. a 1957 airliner? It’s not immediately obvious what would be safer to be honest.

Sorry I was unclear, I mean 50s or 70s air travel compared to present day air travel. (Which on reconsideration might not be particularly relevant haha)

Lot of hijackings still to come in 1950...

Do you really think there are enough hijackings to meaningfully affect safety statistics?

Not very much but there were some years where hijackings were 5% to 10% of air travel deaths.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-fatalities-from-av...

About twice as much. https://www.indianairmails.com/ai-bombay-to-london.html 1948 price was £141 one-way. This likely did not change much in the early years.

The problem is that the suspension would not be great back then.

That seemed high, so I plugged it into the bank of England's inflation calculator[1] and got:

> What cost £85.00 in 1957 would cost £1,796.12 in November 2025.

Not orders of magnitude off, but makes a little more sense this way. I wonder if there's a bug in wikipedia's inflation calculator.

[1] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in...

The template references a site which uses the Retail Price Index[1] (even though it says it uses the Consumer Price Index?), Bank of England uses the Consumer Price Index. Over such a long period a difference of 30% doesn't seem that much.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Inflation/UK/dataset

There was heavy inflation in the seventies: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/gbr/uni...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com