A nonstop airline ticket from New York to Paris on the first weekend in May costs $1,142. A Continental Airlines Inc. flight to attend Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s annual shareholder meeting in Omaha on the same weekend: $1,433.
As investors have been making plans to attend the event that Berkshire’s chairman, Warren Buffett, calls the “Woodstock for capitalists,” carriers including Continental and Delta Air Lines Inc. have been raising prices.
They’re asking four times the normal rate for round-trip tickets, which means New Yorkers will pay more to visit Omaha for the May 1 meeting than London, Rome or Barcelona.
Continental added one flight from the New York area on April 29 and three on April 30, said Mary Clark, a spokeswoman for the airline. Customers who bought tickets earlier paid less for their seats, she said. Now, the Houston-based company is demanding a premium for the spots that remain.
“There does appear to have been high demand,” Clark said. “Since many of those fares have already been sold and there are very few seats left, the seats that are left are at the higher fares.”
Last year, even as the threat of swine flu kept some shareholders away, a record 35,000 people flooded Omaha’s Eppley Airfield and filled the hotels in the city of 439,000.
Three days of events this year start with a reception at the Berkshire-owned Borsheims jewelry store on April 30 and conclude with waves of diners eating steaks at Gorat’s and Piccolo Pete’s, two eateries where Buffett pledged to appear on May 2.
Buffett, 79, built Berkshire into a $200 billion company over four decades by transforming a failing maker of men’s suit linings into an enterprise with businesses ranging from ice cream and underwear to power plants and rail transport.
