The dark arts of revenue management at work!

Booking 6 months in advance indicates that you are 1) willing to pay a premium for a specific date that you are going to lock in right now and 2) have a higher probability of having to cancel or change plans. Great opportunity for a revenue manager: you've got a pax willing to pay a premium and a long time period for cancellation or change events to occur for additional revenue.

Worst case, they earn cancellation fee with margins in the 90%s, best case, the pax makes a lot of changes, and still flies the sectors paying a premium price with change fees with no opportunity cost of revenue as the price is already high (except if they missed out on a change to an even higher fare bucket, but that's icing on the cake). They balance this with known difficulty in filling the seat with alternative business in case the pax doesn't fly - that can be adjusted closer to time by changing fares or talking to sales and marketing about any kind of promotions that need to be targeted on the market.

For us though, 4690 USD all in may or may not be worth it!