Originally Posted by Seat2C

I must have communicated poorly. My comment was that VX continues to sell most of its seats at below breakeven pricing, not that they've never raised ticket prices. VX sells most of their coach tickets at prices below using a breakeven load factor of 100%.
People can complain about 'expensive' airfares but the simple fact of the matter is that a one way ticket JFK-SFO needs to sell at $270 plus tax (2586 mi x .1044 CASM) just to break even at 100% load factor. Any inventory of seats below that price should be extremely limited. And please note that VX's CASM is ~4 cents less than most of their competition.
People always complain about the cost of air travel in spite of the cost being about the same as it was pre-9/11. That's just the modern equivalent of a grumpy old man complaining about the price of candy bars and how they used to be 5 cents when he was a kid.



I don't know about anyone that VX has hired beyond reading the leadership team's backgrounds from the VX website. It seems most of them come from foreign carriers, with a sprinkling of US airline background. The high turnover rate is another problem.
No matter where they got their network planning team, it seems the only criteria that they use is to pick routes (other than JFK-PSP) where there are at least three other carriers serving those routes.



THIS is exactly why I object to carriers selling their tickets below their cost for an extended period of time. The result is destabilization across the entire industry. The airlines wouldn't require bailouts and go through bankruptcies once a decade if there were pricing discipline across all carriers. The only winners with our current system are the lawyers.