<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by goldmedallionflyer:
* FF miles are not part of my compensation. Period. Never was, never will be (I hope!). I pay a higher price for my seat next to you because I didn't have the luxury of booking it 6 months ago. I fly this kind of fare at least once a month, and your $250 round trip seat is next to my $1800 seat. Go figure how many times you'd have to fly for the airline to make the same $$ from you as they just did from me. Clue: By you not flying, the airline might actually make more!
</font>
Since you claim to exact zero value/utility out of the FF programs, you're not a member and you don't collect miles, right? (Why do you frequent FT then, anyway?) Being a member of a FF program would give you zero benefit and would do nothing to make your business travel more acceptable. Nor are you interested in using the miles for your personal travel or giving them away, since neither of these activities give you any utility. Hence, frequent flyer programs do not, in any way, compensate you for traveling.
I'd be willing to guess that most frequent business travelers do extract value from FF programs and FF programs do pose a positive utility proposition, possibly in one of the following ways, but without limitation these benefits for elites- (1) faster/better service when calling the airlines (2) faster airport checkin (3) free or discounted upgrades (4) free or discounted access to airline clubs (5) priority boarding, standby and seat assignments (6) FF miles that can be used for free or upgraded personal or business travel (7) FF miles that can be used for friends or family members.
And how is the opening sentence of the paragraph above related to the rest of the paragraph? I can't figure out how it is relevant at all.
Furthermore, you're making a pretty big and incorrect assumption that by leisure travelers not flying, the airline would make more money. Unfortunately, in the real world, airlines don't have high fare paying business travelers taking up 100% of their seats. Thus any pax they can get to pay any fare that's above the marginal cost of transporting the passenger is bringing them additional revenue and profit. Perhaps I'm not the one who needs the economics training.
Airlines also do a thing called yield management. This is a process whereby they overbook flights in anticipation of passengers not showing up. In the event that more passengers show up than can be accomodated, the airline rebooks the passengers who are denied boarding on other flights. As (1) denied boarding is the exception, not the rule for how things operate and (2) airlines don't fly planes at 100% capacity all of the time and are thus able to shift some customers to later flights, the airlines are able to manage their yield and get the highest number of paying passengers on their flights as possible.
d