Originally Posted by
pitz
LAS may actually be one of the least leisure heavy routes in the system as you have a lot of business travellers to conventions, meetings, etc. YYZ-YEG/YVR/YYC is heavily leisure even though the leisure travelers aren't exactly what you might think they are -- they aren't wearing Hawaiian t-shirts and ordering lots of drinks.
LAS has convention traffic, and YYZ-YEG/YVR/YYC has leisure traffic, but take a look at what people are wearing and baggage they're travelling with or talk to them about why they're flying. There are lots of people in Y travelling for leisure on most flights, but you're absolutely nuts if you think that flights between the country's economic capital (YYZ) and the city with the 2nd most head offices (YYC) and the city with the 3rd most head offices (YVR), plus YEG, which has a fair amount of business activity and a provincial capital that generates plenty of "business" type flying, are "leisure-heavy".
Leisure-heavy is going to be most places that rouge flies - as AC tells it. You want to haggle about LAS, whatever. Replace it in my previous comment with PHX, Hawaii or almost anywhere in Mexico that AC flies other than maybe MEX. There may be a businessperson or two on some of those flights, but they're predominantly driven by leisure traffic. Of course, you'll also find leisure travellers on routes that I'm sure we can both agree are business-heavy like YYZ-LGA.
The point being, on leisure heavy routes, widebodies can be substituted and frequency reduced because leisure really doesn't care about frequency, they just want the lowest price.
The frequency on YYZ-Western Triangle is still quite high even if you sub in the occasional widebody, so I don't see this theory being all that applicable here.
Very few "business class" seats are actually filled with people travelling on, or being paid for by 'business' these days.
As someone who spends a lot of time in AC business class, including the routes you're singling out, I can tell you that this is nonsense. Fewer companies may be paying for domestic/TB J these days, and people may be using eUps, LMUs, etc to sit up front after their companies purchased tickets in Y, but you will still find that most of the people flying in J are travelling on business.
The front cabin probably does better to the Carribean and Florida yield-wise, where you have retirees with money and rich people paying up, than it does on YEG/YVR/YYC where almost nobody is actually paying for it.
Unlikelly, given that AC generally sells the front cabin on those routes for a lot lower prices. The domestic routes may have a lot of upgraders, but the people who bought JCDZP generally paid a lot to be there and a lot of the upgraders will be on expensive Flex/Comfort/Latitude fares, often purchased relatively close in to the flight, rather than rock-bottom Tango K fares bought months beforehand.