Originally Posted by DHAST
You .....ed about your $859 ticket EWR-LAX. Well, if you calculate the "actual" cost, based on CASM, you should have paid $600 rt for the base fare. Throw on a few more $ in taxes, and some profit for CO, and you just barely paid for your "fair share" of the flight. If *you* refuse to pay for a profitable fare to fly on that flight, then who should? Who will? Who's going to subsidize your less-than-CASM fare so you can fly cheaply?
I'd like to see some marketing statistics that can demonstrate the demand for air travel if the ticket prices for that route never dropped below $750. I guarantee you one thing... there will be very very few "long weekends" for me.
I do. Air travel has a price point. With costs as high as they are/were, the airlines are having a difficult time generating the appropriate revenue. If a ticket costs too much, I don't go. Period. The airlines' problem is that they are trying to figure out how to get their average costs below the average price point so that they can turn a profit. The high yield customers are slowly disappearing, which lowers the average yield of those who are left.
I promised I wouldn't post anymore but I'm sorry I couldn't resist this one.
The price point of airline travel is one of the great, dark arts of black voodoo, isn't it?
How about the good old days before 9/11 when 80% of the passengers were paying 50-80% below cost while a handful of FC passengers paid thousands of dollars each and a few poor schlubs in coach paid full Y?
Even today, the majority of flyers are paying below cost. Why do the airlines do this? Obviously a low paying customer is better than nothing at all.
So that's why there's the great, complex and murky range of fares, albeit somewhat simplified since the flying public, especially the biz traveller, has shown an unwillingness to spend as much on the high end as they once did.
Regarding my comment about my $859 ticket. Of course it barely represents a profit, but it doesn't make me feel any better that the person sitting in the much more comfortable aisle seat next to me paid $219 r.t. while I got the middle seat.
And that's really one of the great oddities of the system (for which the credit largely goes to the dark, scary genius of Bill Crandall). When I go to a Broadway musical and I spend 4 times more for a ticket, I do so to get a BETTER seat. When I splurge on an expensive hotel room, I get a better, bigger room, not a worse one. And so forth.
The airline industry is alone in that one can spend many multiples above the lowest price point and end up with a tangibly worse product (or at the very best, the same one!)
It's of course nothing more than supply and demand, but the industry's inability to provide last-minute customers who pay top dollar with any additional quality certainly is a major reason the industry is held in such low regard by its customers.