Originally Posted by
corporate-wage-slave
I don't quite get this "once gone, the customers won't easily come back" idea, on shorthaul it's so price sensitive that there's nothing that a few weeks of price cutting and rebranding won't solve.
That is merely an empirical fact, repeated over and again by the airlines that have 'been there' such as LX, or are still trying - such as AF and AZ. For one of those I actually saw the figures and they were telling.
The fact that a market is price sensitive does not imply that it is fully elastic, far from it, and in many ways, BA has been benefitting from that for years. People do build loyalties, corporate contracts and policies (two different but equally important things) and reputational factors have been well-evidenced to play a significant role in purchase habits in both air travel and other industries, and is also well evidenced not to be symmetric (ie it does take much longer to build up a reputation than to break it down).