trippin_the_rift
Established Member
- Joined
- Apr 2, 2006
- Posts
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I wonder what criteria the strategic team go on historically to gauge if they expect the flight to be full? There is a massive difference between "they expect all tickets to bd sold" vs every seat is occupied at flight close.
If anecdotally 7 days prior to the flight the previous year the F cabin was full you would expect a mixture of commercial fares sold in A & F fare buckets and possibly a couple of P class Classic Awards that may have been booked 353 days out.
At this stage (7 dsys prior) upgrade requests for P1 down would not have been processed.
However, if beancounters/strategic team are basing the stats once the flight has departed then that's a whole different ball game.
In this case as the occupants of the F cabin may comprise 8 pax who booked weeks in advance (see second paragraph above) then the remaining 6 pax could well be 2 staff and 4 J pax who had points upgrade requests confirmed at T-60 hours or T-60 mins if there were commercial no shows in F.
I would expect QF to have a system that analyises things similar to this and put different weightings on each variable to come out with an overall score which leads to a seat being released or not.
- Historical flight load of the requested flight, and requested sector on other flight numbers
- Current loading on competing airlines for the same route with +/- of 3 days
- Trending of competing airlines on the same route over the past 3 months
- Historical flight load of competitors during the same season
- Has this pax ever purchased a revenue ticket on this sector? When? Trending behind this?
- How likely is this pax to purchase a ticket if we decline the award seat release?
- What sub-demographic of pax has historically purchased remaining seats this far out from departure? Does the pax fit the profile?
- Are they travelling with anyone? Spouse? Family? Is this business or pleasure?
- Have they booked a hotel at the destination already (are they commited tot he trip)
- What share of wallet% does QFF hold over this customer ON THIS ROUTE
- How many miles does the pax have on competing airlines/could they fund the trip another way, and if so - what is flight loading like on their alternate options?
- Is the pax earn to burn ratio of FF points climing/declining too rapidly based on their demographic? (risk of churn)
- How much more business could we realise from this customer by releasing the seats (are they top tier already?)
There are 100's of factors involved which are crunched and determined in very little time. For an airline it's about being commercial and maximizing seat revenue and unfortunately this means declining requests at times.
I published this article on how data is changing the way we fly and no doubt Qantas uses some of these data points to determine the release of a seat. At least I hope they do... otherwise it's revenue down the drain!
Original article: https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/8649-how-big-data-is-changing-the-way-you-fly
But like you say OzBeachBabe - all bets are off until the doors are closed!