Originally Posted by
orbitmic
Totally agree with you. I do that too, and again, business people are not robots either and many will prefer to optimise their work off and on the ground to be able to kiss their kids good night rather than arrive the next morning. This is not a negligible criterion.
I would have thought that this criterion would militate for exactly the opposite solution: it is not arriving the
next morning but the
previous morning: 99% of travelers who are in a position to take a 7am or 8am morning flight are in a position to take one of the numerous night flights the night before. The choice is normally, therefore, either a night flight on D arriving early morning on D+1 versus taking a flight early morning on D+1 and arriving late evening on D+1. Moreover, once you have added the time of getting home, the kids will long be in bed before you get home from the day flight.
Originally Posted by
orbitmic
I think that is back to my last point: I think that if AF's strategy was BA's strategy it might be enough to justify opening that (of course when you do, you start also adapting your marketing, so for instance offering competitive through fares for - e.g. - JFK-PVG, JFK-SIN, etc via Paris) and in that sense you create demand. But because AF's strategy is AF's strategy, probably not so!
Are you seriously suggesting that there is a substantial untapped market of persons who would like to fly SA-NYC-Europe? Or JFK-Europe-Asia? That strikes me as rather implausible. Yes, there will be a handful of people occasionally in that situation but it seems to me rather implausible that this is enough to warrant a dedicated day service. It seems to me that this day service is 99% targeted at O&D demand in the same way as LCY services are targetted at O&D. Even if there might be the odd transferee on there, I would have thought that this is clearly not the market for which the flights are designed and transfer customers are a marginal clientele for these services.