Originally Posted by
Stranger
They may have data but between having them and drawing the right conclusions there is a big gap. Problem with data is you have tons of them, and what you get from them ends up depending on too many assumptions. Allowing for significant wishful thinking left or right.
Exactly. YYC sounded more like "we have limited aircraft, so we can either keep operating YYC, or massively strengthen our major hubs", and they decided the latter was a better business strategy. They used "data", but I have no idea how successful that decision was. I'm not even sure if they'd have the data to make really informed conclusions.
In my industry, if you want to test something, you run it in parallel with the alternative. Then it's very clear to see that A makes more money than B.
If you just try option A, then even if it performed better than pre-A, you don't know if it's better than B.
And if you switch from A to B, it's very hard to isolate other factors.
What if they had pulled out of YYC in February 2020. Would it be fair to say, two years later, based on "data", that it was a bad decision, because they've lost a ton of money since then? Obviously not. But not every external factor is as visible as COVID.
"Data shows that either option should improve things over the current state, but it's unclear which would be better". A new CEO very well may make a different choice there.