Southwest Airlines Co. recently made an announcement that like other airlines, it has also raised prices on tickets favored by business travelers.
Southwest confirmed that the hike of $6 to $10 per round trip will stick. The increase relates to last-minute tickets usually purchased by business travelers.
"Southwest was the very last and most important major airline to increase the prices on business travelers. If Southwest which is country's leading discount airline and a price-setter on many routes had balked, it could have forced other airlines to roll back the price rise," said Jaime Baker, an analyst with J.P. Morgan.
US Airways, United, Delta and Continental confirmed that they raised prices this week. Southwest did not make any price changes on advance-purchase tickets used more often by leisure travelers.

A Peruvian family has laid claim to the Machu Picchu ruins of Peru, and has appealed to the United Nations' global heritage body to help them. The Abril family already launched five lawsuits over the Machu Picchu ruins in 2004, and after the Peruvian government maintained a strong stand, they have appealed to the United Nations' agency UNESCO to solve the dispute.
Seventy-year-old Edgar Echegaray Abril still has the sale deed showing that his family bought the estate where Machu Picchu stands with gold in 1910. They sold it to the Zavaleta family, in 1944, but not the land forming the Machu Picchu ruins as they were being expropriated by the state. However, the expropriation was never formally completed of both Machu Picchu and the surrounding land, although they have been treated as government lands for a long time now. Now, the Abril family is now claiming the compensation that could potentially run into hundreds of millions of dollars for the Machu Picchu site, whereas the Zavaleta family is claiming compensation for the 22,000 hectares of land lying inside what is now the Machu Picchu Archaeological Park. Machu Picchu is one of the major revenue generators for Peruvian tourism as about 90 % of its revenue from tourism is from the site.

As per official figures released by the World Tourism Organization for the first half of 2011, South America's tourism has shown splendid growth in the recent times even though the economic situation in the world is currently unstable. The report has shown that tourism sector the world over has grown even faster than they had expected (4.5 %) with South American tourism growing at an astonishing 15 %.
The main reason behind the growth of South America's tourism at this rate is Barbados, Cuba, Cayman Islands and Curacao, in particular, which performed exceedingly well. The Bahamas and Jamaica were not taken into account as they are only available for the first four months. Another major contributing factor is that there is a diverse source market for South American tourism which includes Latin America, a broad range of European and Asian countries, as well as Canada. Also another contributing factor was the options of cruises for South American tourism destinations.