Hello all,
I've noticed that, since moving to Hong Kong last year, tickets on short-haul CX are nearly always the same price to each destination regardless of whether you're flying tomorrow or in 12 months' time. As an example, below is a screenshot for a search for an 8-day trip HKG-ICN with Cathay selected. The same phenomenon is visible on Cathay's own website, albeit you can only see a shorter window for price comparison.


The same is true for HKG-SIN (always GBP170 r/t in Y, 757GBP r/t in PE, 1420GBP in J) HKG-BKK (GBP203/GBP533/GBP650 respectively), HKG-TPE, etc.
There are some variations, but it seems that Cathay almost always sells tickets at a fixed price with minimal regard for actual load. What's strange is that usually you'll board one of these services, invariably operated by a massive long-haul widebody, and there are many empty seats. I'm aware of the complexities of airline pricing but surely it would be better for Cathay and the travelling public if they could price dynamically on these routes so as to fill that spare capacity?

I'm conditioned by years of flying intra-EU with BA, where the load factor always appeared higher, fares were highly dynamic, and BA actually used the right-sized planes for the job. The A319/320/321s were perfect for this - whereas Cathay seems to want to fly a 777 on a 1.5hr hop to TPE. It's particularly annoying being based in HKG as the Tier Points awarded by BAEC for such flights are exremely low -- e.g. 25 each way for PE (which could be considered the equivalent service standard as Club Europe by BA) vs. 40-80TP each way for Club Europe, and that's despite CX in PE costing nearly twice as CE on BA usually does. Even with Business on Cathay, which is sometimes 3x the price of BA in Club Europe for a similar-distanced flight, you only get 80TPs despite spending up to 1500GBP as noted above. In Europe, you'd spend e.g. 500GBP to get to and from Athens in CE and get 160TPs for the pleasure.

The benefit is that it means I can avoid booking until very late and not worry about missing out on a good deal, but I do feel that the whole setup leaves a lot to be desired.

Was it always like this?