Revenue Management Follies--Method or Madness?
 

Looking for a seat LAX-PDX on a Saturday in February. Checking 75K upgrade (haha) eligible fares, which are the two middle columns. The left column is "Main" cabin. The far right is F. Connecting from Asia with scheduled 5pm arrival. Here is what I found:

https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...31fab7de20.png
Can anyone top this? Hell, anyone want to take a crack at explaining it?

You just beat me to it :)

That is full fare Y -- a refundable ticket. The price is not crazy for a refundable ticket. The real question is, why is there no availability for lower booking classes? There seems to be a lot of Y space (it's not just the last few seats)

Obviously they think that they will sell enough Y to make it worth their while.

I don't think that's how it works. Each published X fare has an underlying booking code. In order to ticket it you need both the X and the underlying booking code. Theoretically they could publish an X fare for Y but they don't.

deleted

deleted

Sorry about that, folks. I meant to illustrate that the Sunday fares don't even approach the $400 mark. Whether the $439 fare on 2/23 is mistake or simply egregious gouging, that is the question...In any event, I can overnight, pay for a nice hotel, fly home Sunday and still not pay as much as that 2/23 8:30 flight...

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...ff4eefff8b.png

There are hundreds if not thousands of these threads published about AS and every other air carrier in the world. They all revolve around a central theme, e.g. that the air carrier is nuts to sell Ticket X for $Y. The post then accuses the carrier of "gouging" for charging what a purely market-driven system sets the price at. It's not gouging.

AS has multi-million dollar software to set RM/IM and therefore pricing based on hundreds of factors. None of us have that.

Could be some of the reasons from above and could be something else. Bottom line is that February is a long way off and if AS has any reasonable belief that someone will pay the asking price that far away, why on earth sell it for less. If it turns out that AS can't sell at that price, it will sell into a lower fare bucket. Also, don't forget that many people flying this route are connecting at LAX so they are not buying the segment fare you are looking at.

For you it's a crap shoot. Could be that the price drops or could be that the flight sells out.

They go pretty high up the ladder though. For that route, it looks like Q is the lowest code that is not an underlying code for any X fare.

P on that 0820 looks pretty good ... (although, speaking of RM, it's interesting that the buyup is $74 on that flight but $69 on the 1050)

The other day I was hunting for a LAX-SEA flight and everything was ~$70 the whole day EXCEPT for the horrible redeye (midnight-3a) which was only available in full Y. I fly that terrible flight somewhat frequently and many times I'm the only one who isn't an AS employee heading home. So RM does weird stuff sometimes.