knope2001

Exceptional fares on select flights to/from MKE and Los Angeles, Newark, and Fort Lauderdale. $69 LAx and $49 to EWR or FLL. Must buy by 1/31/10.

Travel through 2/19, but the lowest fare is limited seating on a certain days. Code TWT28

newsmanhoss

Interesting. They must be expecting some pretty light flights during the next few weeks. I'm sure the overcapacity on the LAX route is a contributing factor for that route. I did a spot check for a trip MKE-LAX from 2/4 to 2/9 and it's $102 outbound and $69 coming back. Interestingly, the $69 fare said it was a fully refundable fare.

AirTran on the same dates is offering two outbound nonstop flights for $99 and $89 for the return.

In total, YX and FL are offering a combined 3x day from MKE-LAX, which has to be overkill in February. I am flying that route in less than a week, so I'll report back anecdotally on what the loads are like.

BlueHorseShoe2000

That's my guess as well.

The prices on the FLL flights are surprising, considering when I booked flights several weeks back fares were nearly $300.

knope2001

These fares are limited to just a handful of flights in each city pair, pretty much all on off-peak days.

Seat maps on the MKE-FLL-MKE flights with the $49 fare suggest these were booked to an average of about 55% full. I checked first thing this morning and hope to see how much the seat maps change after the sale.

Seat maps on the A319 flights are somewhat less reliable to guesstimate load factors because more people appear to book without seat assignments. If you compare the seat map of a YX A319 flights 25 hours and then again 1 hour before departure, the number of occupied seats tends to jump a lot more than seat map of an E-jet or RJ flight. But keeping that in mind, I'd guess the select MKE-LAX and LAX-MKE segments with the $69 fare were booked mostly in the 40-50% range...definitely among the weaker days. I agree with newsmanhoss' notion that MKE-LAX is overserved for the time of year with 3x day, although the connecting traffic coming through MKE makes a difference when it comes to filling seats. From watching seat maps I'd estimate MKE-LAX for Midwest to have averaged around 70% for January, which isn't bad considering everything. But January has days which benefitted from the holidays and the MLK weekend, and there are some flights running quite a bit lighter than that.

Finally, MKE-EWR in general seems to be suffering in light of the high capacity low fare service to LGA. In addition to YX just having the 2x/day ERJ at this point, Continental keeps pushing back on the market, too. For a couple of years Continental has cut MKE-EWR down to 3x/day in January, but usually went back to 4x/day by mid February and often 5x/day by spring. That's how they originally had the 2010 schedule loaded, but they have at least twice now delayed the restoration of flight #4...now it doesn't come back until June...and there's no sign of #5 coming back at this point. One wonders if Midwest will keep MKE-EWR as a low-capacity/higher-fare market for those people who will pay more to get EWR, or if they will operated larger aircraft there for lower costs/lower fares to relieve pressure on the LGA flights. The 5x/day MKE-LGA flights are filling the E170 pretty well in the dead of winter, and more seats to the NYC market will undoubtedly come one way or another come warmer weather.

mke9499

Did anyone on this board take advantage of the promo?

Maybe one of our YX contacts can let us know how the response was, and which of the destinations was the most popular. It is probably very easy to track.

bluethunder

We had hundreds of click-throughs to view the Twitter promo, but ticket sales were not worth mentioning. This is not surprising since our Twitter following is still relatively small, and the followers were not in "shopping mode" when we tweeted it. Twitter promos are something we're having fun experimenting with. Any feedback from this group regarding Twitter promos is much appreciated.

mke9499

The offer was tempting, but the off-peak travel dates just would not work with my schedule.

There was a bit of a discrepancy between how the fare came up as fully refundable on the search results page (red asterisk next to the fare), vs the non-refundable fare in the terms and conditions, displayed when clicking on the fare basis code. The refundable fare was mentioned in the above post by hoss.

Perhaps something like UA's E-Fares could be offered in the future.

BlueHorseShoe2000

I think this could be a good way for Midwest to highlight/promote certain routes and increase bookings.

A combination of mass emails and use of social media could work very well.

MikeFromMKE

I do like the way that JetBlue has their "cheeps." By having the twitter promos happen every Monday it is easy to get into a habit of looking forward to them on Mondays. While I haven't had a chance to take advantage of any of their fares they are often extremely low but extremely limited (ie we have 50 seats available at x fare one way).

knope2001

Here are my thoughts about these twitter sales can be more successful...

(1) People need to be tuned in to the possibility of these specials. Having a regular stream of them (a couple of times per month, perhaps even weekly) will groom followers to entertain the possibility of acting. People craving a getaway, or needing a mileage run, or thinking about surprising a spouse with a trip…if they are groomed to the presence of these deals they can mull it over long before the sale destinations are announced.

(2) I like that this offer was not only for flights in the next few days. That helps for people with slightly less flexibility than the drop-what-you’re-doing-and-pack crowd.

(3) Make sure that the dates are not *too* locked down, and that the specials can be combined with other fares. Rather than just putting the fare on the absolute emptiest days, opening up a few more dates, perhaps with more limited seating, could add to the utility. That doesn’t mean that there are cheap seats on a winter Saturday morning to Florida. But don’t keep it too locked down.

(4) Similarly, mixing up the destinations…again, not just the very emptiest flights…is helpful. If it’s just Louisville and Newark again and again, people will tune out.

(5) Consider adding a business day…perhaps a Friday or Monday…to the time window so that people can ask off from work.

I want to be sure to state that this past promotion…LAX, FLL and EWR….were already good on #2 and #4. These were great destinations. Nevertheless, I’m still pointing these five things out because if you do go forward with using social media for this more, they are be critical for maximum effectiveness.

Of course the key objective is to sell seats on rather empty flights. But if you want to get people on the empty Sunday morning MKE-LAX, letting them come back on low and moderate demand day is still a good thing.

Again, this recent Twitter sale had great destinations, and could be combined with other fares. Those things were good, and I hope they keep up. But if you also (a) get people to mentally prepare and anticipate these sales, (b) open up dates a bit more and (c) give people time to ask off from work by adding some business-day hours, you’ll probably be a lot more successful.

newsmanhoss

It's been at least 6-7 years since last offered, but I still really miss the Best Care Web Fares. They used to arrive every Tuesday morning for travel that weekend...as low as $98 round trip. I understand they probably can't offer fares like that anymore, but something similar to UA's E-fares would definitely be welcomed.

I would take advantage of them from time to time if they came up.