Originally Posted by
MichielR
I think the biggest mistake in that thinking is that in order to sell 4 seats you need to have only 4 seats on the plane. 4 is more an average than a maximum.
If a c-suite paying F customer (or their assistant) books a week in advance and sees no F seat available (s)he is not going to fly a day earlier or later but switch to the competition. The current A inventory provides a buffer that allows them to retain these customers.
I couldn't agree more, and agree with the masses that this reduction in F seats is stupid.
A good example is found in my home airport of MIA. I'm glad I booked my round trip to MUC for November unusually early, as for both of my flights F is already now completely full, 2 months out. It is very difficult to get award availability, particularly in F, to MIA, so I'd be surprised if more than 1 of the 8 seats weren't revenue tickets. Sure, I can still find some availability via FRA or ZRH, but those flights also have a total of 8 seats, and are not exactly empty either. If all LHG flights in and out of MIA had 3/4 F seats, this lack of availability would be much more significant.
Maybe on some routes the small cabin makes sense but certainly not on all. I can see this causing me to switch to AF if the combination of pricing and availability with LHG becomes too unattractive. AF's F does cost more but is certainly worlds ahead of LHG's, particularly if you have to connect.
I don't know why LHG is working hard to ensure that a fantastic source of revenue, last minute full fare F tickets, will be unnecessarily hard to book.