Originally Posted by
jordyn
I find it pretty disturbing that an AA exec misunderstands their own data to this degree. 87% of the total passenger base only flies once per year, but it is definitely not the case that on a typical plane 87% of the passengers are on their only flight, because the other 13% definitionally fly more often. AA separately said that revenue is split about 50/50 between "once a year" passengers and more frequent fliers; if you naively assume that each group pays about the same per flight, then you'd expect about half of the passengers on the plane are in the frequent flier bucket and therefore get subjected to the announcement over and over again. So you're not annoying 13% of the plane for the benefit of the 87%, you're annoying the 50% of the passengers who are actual frequent fliers and therefore presumably more likely to be motivated by a frequent flier program.
Edited to add: it's totally possible that revenue per enplanement is different for frequent fliers versus once-a-year passengers, but I can see arguments in both directions. I'm 100% sure that the average per-flight split is closer to 50/50 than 83/17, in any case.
Yeah, that's a pretty remarkable misunderstanding (or misrepresentation?) of their own statistic. And because I couldn't remember for sure, the statistic (as
reported) is indeed 87% of their unique customers, not 87% of their enplanements. So even if all of those 13% fly AA only twice per year, only 77% of the enplanements are one-time-per-year AA fliers.
For the multiple-trips-per-year fliers to account for half of the trips flown, they'd have to average about 6.7 trips per year. (87 / (87 + 13*6.7) = 0.5.) My wild guess is that the average is a bit less than 6.7, but not much. So I would guess that the once-per-year fliers actually give AA fairly comparable revenue per trip. Probably partly because they would tend to fly longer distances: if you fly once per year or less, it's probably more likely to get to Hawaii or Europe or somewhere else a long way away. If you fly once per year, you'd drive not fly from Chicago to Cleveland or DC to Boston. But there are a heck of a lot of "probably"s in this paragraph.