Originally Posted by
ijgordon
Well, yes, I do usually buy more than 21 days in advance. However, "the current pricing environment" shows me a $3,359 r/t fare, out Tues May 27, back Fri May 30. That's a 7 day advance purchase, with 3-day minimum stay (not even a Sat night stay). Fare available on virtually all (if not all) departures.
FWIW, I'm seeing IAD and ORD at ~$3500, slightly more. SFO $3700 (I'm assuming EWR-LHR at $3.4k is more profitable than SFO-LHR at $3.7 though).
With no advance purchase but still 3-day min stay the fare goes up to $5.7k.
The only reason that yields on this route would be as high as you say is if there are a high number of travelers buying last-minute tickets for a 1-2 day trip. I suppose that's possible, but they're usually clearing upgrades 72+ hours before, if not releasing lots of PZ even earlier. Though of course I didn't look at PE/Y fares.
Unless you can provide some concrete data on how picking random dates for advance fare in a particular class has a direct correlation with profitability of a route, all these one off examples are not helping make a case.
As stated before by myself and others, there are so many other inputs that go into calculating a profitable route. And even then you’d want more than two or three or four data points.
And your example date range happens to be the short week with the Memorial Day Monday. The shorter work week probably impacts business travel as many people might be taking the whole week off. So another input into the calculations.