I’m a big fan of Kayak, an online travel service.  It is for me the default go-to for researching airfares; Kayak has the best tools for searching through and evaluating airfares.  The service lets you sort by airport, departure/arrival time, layover, total duration, type of aircraft, and on and on.  You want to leave from the LA area on a weekend morning on a Star Alliance flight with a maximum of one transfer but you’re flexible on dates?  Kayak can help.  And with the complexity of airfares, you need all the help you can get.  I’ve opted-in to a weekly email update from Kayak with the latest deals on flights from LAX to Asia.  So here’s what I got today from Kayak:

(Actually, I sorted that for you by cost, from lowest to highest.)

Notice how there are three geographical bands evident:

• East Asia (Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and, anomalously, Vietnam) with the lowest fares, averaging $627 return from Los Angeles.
• Southeast Asia (Thailand, Phillipines, Cambodia, Singapore, Indonesia) average $781 from Los Angeles, with Phuket as an outlier.
• South Asia (India and Bangladesh) average $1035, plus Balikpapan in Indonesia which is new to me.

Within the bands, South Asia has the highest range from low to high; more than $300.  East and Southeast Asia are $100 and less.

But then I said to myself, “Self, what about the distance travelled to these places?”  So here’s a chart for you, based on Great Circle data, of the distance from LAX to each of those destinations, sorted from farthest to nearest:

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This isn’t exactly what I was expecting; the East Asian band is clear enough at the bottom, but somehow in terms of great circle distances, South and Southeast Asia aren’t so clearly distinguished.  Bombay and Bangkok are both farther from Los Angeles than Delhi, which is closer than Dhaka.  Now, you can argue that this is not exactly correct because there aren’t today flights from LAX that go beyond Hong Kong and Singapore; maybe Bangkok now?  So that to get to Delhi or elsewhere in South Asia you’re going to need to transfer (typically in Singapore or Tokyo if you’re going west; it’s about equidistant going in the other direction via Dubai or London) and that’s going to add to the duration.  And you, my pedantic reader, would be right.  Bless you.  Here’s a map of the routes, from The Great Circle Mapper:

Then — we’re in the home stretch, dear reader! — I put the two, price and distance, together to give us a cost per mile comparison which looks again very different:

These cost per mile bands reveal that although Narita is the cheapest in nominal terms from LAX, it’s actually only middling in cost per mile terms.  Ho Chi Minh City is hands-down the cheapest per mile and Dhaka is off the chart on the other end, almost double Saigon.  (Within the bands I’ve sorted by distance, longest to shortest.) India’s cost per mile varies widely, from ten to thirteen cents per mile.

Travel arbs, start your jet engines!