Originally Posted by
Kremmen
True, but it's much better than 70%. If they make 80% next year, maybe they're on the right track? Inefficiency can be dealt with without downsizing. (I suspect Thai wages being way below Singapore and Hong Kong wages is why they can get away with way more employees per aircraft than SQ and CX. It also means there is much more they could achieve.)
TG's fleet is not that disparate for its size. (It's almost all 772/773/333/744, with 787/380 additions coming along, while they retire the 744.) It is not, in my experience, unreliable. On-time performance for me is better than any airline in its region. (i.e. better than UA, PR, SQ, OZ, NH, QF, DL)
The one thing I'd agree with is that their web site is lousy. They should fix it, no matter what else they do with the airline. (Like the over-staffing, simply making cut-backs will not fix this.)
Indeed, if they reach 80% with paid pax, that would be good.
Let's not get in a discussion of wages, overstaffing and conistions of the contract (including retirement age).
The current fleet is 737/772/772ER//773/773ER/787/744 A320/A330/A380 plus several A340s still on the books. Furthermore there are several seat configurations within plane types. It is hard to think of a more disparate fleet.
By unreliable, I did not mean ontime performance. I mean booking two months ahead and having schedules completely changed a couple of times (as well as aircraft). I mean flying for business and pay expensive fares to discover that you cannot change flights because all fare buckets are zeroed, eventhough you know that the flight will be half empty; just some manual yield management that TG is famous for.
The web site is lousy, but it is much more than the website. It is also all the various softwares/systems that interact with the website. A website can be redesigned rather easily, but the whole IT system needs overhaul. And that includes the complete pricing approach where yield management system seem to be hardly used and replaced by a wet thumb approach by some TG luminaries.