Originally Posted by
mozilla
I don't care about lower fares but would love to see lower load factors and less overcrowding in the clubs and the terminals in general, but for the time being, I haven't seen that really materialize.
good luck with that.
Sorry, the lower load factors are from days long ago, and aren’t coming back. It took them a
long time, but airlines finally learned that market share isn’t worth chasing exclusively when it lowered profit. Now the focus is on profit, which means they aren’t going back to the days of hourly flights that are cheap to make sure that, say, UA is able to pick up customers over DL on a given route, while sending out half empty planes. And packing in the seats, while they’re at it.
Airlines at some point realized that rather than chase each other for most capacity while dropping fares to encourage more passengers for them, etc., it makes more sense to limit capacity to what they need, carry fewer passengers on a given route, with higher profits from higher fares that brings. And they had more planes to deploy on other routes they hadn’t served before. Add in the extra fees, and airlines have finally been making big $ again. You don’t think they would really give that up, do you?
Originally Posted by
mherdeg
I think the party line is that the customers who are leaving aren't price sensitive (no amount of fare slashing will get back the people who are worried about exposure to sensitive individuals after travel), so any fare cuts will just make things worse. IIRC a Southwest exec said this, and I assume it became industry consensus.
this.
take me for example. Two trips. One - domestic - was canceled (events canceled - no point in going anymore, though I suppose we could). Expensive fare that is being reimbursed, though this fare leaving Fri. has lowered to a reasonable amount, though I wouldn’t call it cheap. one international (to Caribbean - first time we were supposed to go in 10 years!) for spring break for the family - two relatively young adults and two kids. Not really worried about getting sick ourselves - we’re not in a group that would be high risk to have serious consequences (fever isn’t fun, of course, but we are relatively healthy and young). More worried about being quarantined somehow - country becomes a hotspot, someone on the flight starts coughing and sets off a panic, or our 2 year old gets a fever because, well, she’s a two year old, so not odd - and that causes a panic based on the current environment. Not a high risk, IMO, but the consequences would be great if it did happen. It’s not a risk I want to take at the moment. Low fares (which our flight was NOT) isn’t much of a factor - the waived change fee helps as it makes the change very low cost - we’ll use the credit by the end of the year for sure.