Originally Posted by Duke787

Not sure I would tie the two. The same way that a bad economy tends to lead to cheaper fares and more incentives to FFPs, you'd think that if they were feeling the pinch of the shutdown they'd drive big time fare sales to try and entice leisure travelers to fill in the void of government travelers (because the business travelers will go regardless and they can use the inflexible fare buckets to capture that already) or would offer FF incentives (e.g., double miles).

The seats are gone once the flight departs so it's far more likely they'd take one of these actions to at least cover their fixed costs by enticing a few leisure travelers (and maybe FTers looking for an MQM run) to jump off the fence and book that trip they'd been debating for a while.