Agreed; many people seem to forget that DXB is not a big O&D destination (except from the UK!) - EK are selling USA-DXB-x where fares are much more competitive. Terminating in DXB is going to cost you a big premium for a direct ULH as they have no trouble filling the flight with connecting pax.

That's true. I just checked random dates in November for BOS-DXB-BOM rt and EK is the cheapest at $4690 ai (11/6-11/14). However, at 30 cpm it is by no means a bargain.

The dark arts of revenue management at work!

Booking 6 months in advance indicates that you are 1) willing to pay a premium for a specific date that you are going to lock in right now and 2) have a higher probability of having to cancel or change plans. Great opportunity for a revenue manager: you've got a pax willing to pay a premium and a long time period for cancellation or change events to occur for additional revenue.

Worst case, they earn cancellation fee with margins in the 90%s, best case, the pax makes a lot of changes, and still flies the sectors paying a premium price with change fees with no opportunity cost of revenue as the price is already high (except if they missed out on a change to an even higher fare bucket, but that's icing on the cake). They balance this with known difficulty in filling the seat with alternative business in case the pax doesn't fly - that can be adjusted closer to time by changing fares or talking to sales and marketing about any kind of promotions that need to be targeted on the market.

For us though, 4690 USD all in may or may not be worth it!

Don't jump to conclusions.
I checked EVERY MONTH until EOS and the fare is $4690 regardless.

Exactly - set a high fare and see if anyone bites - those people you will make money off regardless of whether they will cancel. Whilst it may be a new route, EK have lots of data as to the travelling habits of pax from the USA to BOM from their other routes to make a few initial assumptions. They know the rate of cancellations for various booking windows. So, anyone who is booking at 4690 can be regarded as a probable, but not confirmed - the probability of moving a probable to confirmed increases as the departure date approaches, but you have already set the fare high to pay for any offload compensation that might become due if you've really oversold. As the time approaches to dates where they need to turn all the tentatives and probables into confirmed seats, then they will start to look at pricing and see if they need to adjust (or hold steady if they have information that makes them think there will be last minute demand, e.g. events occurring in BOS or across the cities where the majority of BOS originating pax terminate in, which of course they have good data for). They then adjust fares and marketing and watch the effect on loads. If they still need to do other things - that's when we see these short window sale fares, or targeted offers and upgrade emails.

Whilst I may personally think that 4690 might be a tad high for BOS-DXB-BOM, I would argue that EK are making profits on the route at good yields. I don't think EK's revenue managers are stupid - well, apart from maybe that CRK route, but shrug, no one is perfect!

Maybe you misunderstand my post.
The fare is $4690 regardless if you depart and return in July, August, September, October, November, December, etc.
There seems to be no "fare adjusting" whatsoever for closer or further away dates.
It is almost as if the guy in charge of yield management on the BOS-BOM route decided to just pick a number, let the computer apply it to any and all dates, turn the computer off, and go home.

I think we have different perspectives on our timescales - I think in the absence of any hard seasonality data for ex-BOS departures, anything above 1 month out is going to be regarded as "tentative", so they are applying one standard fare (in this case 4690USD) and seeing how it works out. Perhaps I have painted a picture of revenue managers as being exact data scientists who have finely tuned algorithms and methodologies behind their pricing decisions - all the revenue managers I know, whilst they have a lot of data and heavy lifting done for them by complicated revenue management software, still sometimes just throw things at the wall and hope it sticks! In the case of this route, 85% load factor in the first three weeks seems to indicate they are doing something right: whether their internal yield targets have been hit, we shall never know!

You mean the route is "too new" to be sure about pricing and yield and therefore just set a base price and see what happens? Sounds plausible.

Pretty much - makes sense to start with a high base price and then adjust down through promotions if it's too high. Much harder to start with low fares and adjust higher - from a pax point of view, you aren't getting anything more for your money. Well, in fact, you aren't, haha!

The exchange issue is a problem, yes. But the other way (DXB-EZE-DXB), tickets are about half the price. So exchange rates don't fully account for it.

Actually, that makes perfect sense and the exchange rates DO fully account in my mind. Since a good number of the ex-EZE tickets would be sold in ARS, but EK is probably having trouble exchanging pesos for USD (or AED or whatever end currency they want). So, if someone wants to buy a ticket with ARS, they will pay whatever the official exchange rate is for 4600 USD, so EK can guard against possible devaluations (whether from the government or in the forex markets) in ARS.

Ex-DXB tickets would likely be sold in AED, possibly USD. But AED is effectively pegged to the USD, and both currencies are easy enough for EK to deal with. Hence the lower price. At 40% inflation, plus the consumer being able to trade at the more favorable blue market ARS/USD rate, charging twice the price to originate in EZE makes a lot of sense to me. Particularly if the government enacts restrictions similar to those in Venezuela. But we are getting way off topic here .