Originally Posted by
Totoro
In the late hours of the evening, I obviously have too much spare time if I'm musing about CO's yield management software. xyzzy's comment in another thread touched on CO's excellent yield management, and I've long wondered whether the software is individualized.
For example, if 5 passenger on a given EWR-SEA flight are connecting from BWI, does CO look only at historical data and conclude that 80% of BWI-EWR-SEA passengers show up? Alternatively, does CO look at profiles of passengers A - E and conclude that passenger A shows up 20% of the time whereas passengers B-E show up 100% of the time? Depending on the numbers, the results could be rather different.
As interesting as the idea is, I do not think that this (individualized yield management) is the case. And there are several reasons for this:
1. The confidence levels would be too low. Most individual do not fly enough on a single airline to have significant statistics. And individual flying patterns can change very suddenly: change of jobs, locations, life circumstances...
2. It would be extremely expensive, and maybe provide only a marginal improvement over global statistics.
3. I just cannot imagine CO's IT being able to handle this!
Just my $0.02