Originally Posted by
enpremiere
When it comes to filling seats, they’re doing quite well so there is more capacity discipline than in years past and less slack during cancellations or interruptions.
When it comes to profits and satisfying stakeholders (as well as customers), maybe not so much.
There's a difference between filling seats and capacity discipline. Filling seats isn't the best metric of their performance at managing their capacity. If I run 3 flights a day and fill all the seats, but there is demand for another 250 seats, I'm missing out on potential sales by not having those seats available. Not to mention if I'm so capacity constrained/have no slack capacity that a single cancellation requires 2+ days to reroute I'm losing substantially because most non-leisure travellers aren't waiting around for that next flight. They're taking the refund and rebooking on an outside airline that can get them to their destination sooner, and most likely booking away from me in the future because of my crap performance at reliably getting them to their destination.