Numbers are in. They are meaningless, without knowing how much people paid, on average. They are succeeding in offering fewer seats, and while fewer tickets were sold, the number of seats filled was (as it should be) higher. Presumably, the notion is that the more uncomfortable you make them, the more satisfied your customers are. Of course, there will always be those pesky merger related expenses. I finally got an email today, telling me I was dropped to Platinum. I don't expect to spend much time figuring out how it differs from CP. Just watching from the sidelines. :D

deel-
is plat a soft- or proper- landing given your flight activity?

I would call it soft. I only did 63,000 miles in 2005, and was also under on segments. I could have easily made CP by giving them my east coast to Seattle business, where I did north of 40,000 on Alaska. That activity on US would have required a connect, meaning it would have created much more qualifying mileage on them. In 2006, I have done about 2300 miles. That involved a roundtrip to Florida, where, in an unusual turn of events, the world's first full service, lowfare carrier, actually was that day.

The load factor was actually a little lower than I expected. UA's was 88.3%! With all the capacity that's been cut by bankrupt airlines, there's a lot of full airplanes. Good for the airlines, bad for us. Meanwhile, the stock keeps rising. Who's paying $55 for LCC?

Also, I saw AC sold more of their shares. They've turned their $75M investment into $205.5M in under a year. And their still holding 500K shares! I think if Parker wants to buy another airline (NW?), he won't have any trouble raising money.

The load factor was actually a little lower than I expected. UA's was 88.3%! With all the capacity that's been cut by bankrupt airlines, there's a lot of full airplanes. Good for the airlines, bad for us. Meanwhile, the stock keeps rising.


UA had a bigger capacity cut, so they also had a bigger load factor increase.
[the math of that is easy-- on average the cut capacity will be on the emptier side of operations, so the remaining bits are those that run fuller].

As Deelmakur noted, without revenue info such traffic numbers are not of much use. US (or UA or whoever) could achieve a 100% load factor by only running peak hour flights between the highest O&D cities, but of course they'd quickly go bust doing so...

The traffic numbers for the industry as a whole tend to indicate the amount of pricing power the airlines have. Obviously one airline's LF doesn't tell you much about its financial health, but the LF of the industry as a whole tends to indicate the health of the industry. All indications are that yields have been rising, and airlines seem to be showing some discipline.

US claims its revenue is above average. I hope for the sake of their shareholders that the revenue numbers are as good as they've claimed. If they don't have a profitable quarter and year a lot of people are going to get hurt.