chollie

Right or wrong, the assumption seems to be that holding out for last minute pax willing or forced to pay extremely high fares is more profitable than selling those same seats at a last-minute discount.

I don't know if any airlines has hard data to support this.

I agree with the previous poster, the official excuse is that if they lowered prices at the last minute, everyone would wait till the last minute to buy. I'm not sure I agree with that. Business travellers who have to be somewhere at a certain time probably wouldn't chance it, and I'm not sure there are extremely large numbers of leisure travellers who would either.

I might book tickets like these in addition to my regular travel, but I would never buy them for regular travel, ie, I might use them for spur of the moment visits to family or long weekends somewhere.

It would be interesting to see an airlines try selling heavily discounted seats at t-24 - maybe in coach only, non-mileage earning. Might fill some otherwise empty seats with folks flexible enough to travel last minute, particularly if they couldn't use the fares as mileage runs.