Who killed non-rev shoulder season?

luke3 said:
We still don't have business class Zed fares, not even on our partner airlines, and our employee discount is a joke. It's a fixed percentage off the full fare and I've often found cheaper tickets at retail price by checking google flights. Based on what some of my friends at UAL are showing me, if we could get anything similar I probably wouldn't nonrev anymore
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Forgot to mention this point, we do have them on Virgin Atlantic but that's it. Indeed a shame with Air France/KLM partnership that we don't have access to biz ZEDs. Also a shame that almost none (if any) of our agreements are for ZED low.
 
bike21 said:
Alaska cruise season is starting to slow down I think, should help with the SEA commuters like me.
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Yeah, jump seat season for my SEA commute is largely over now that cruise season is done. A few blips to come in Jan/Feb when bowl games and golf tournaments come to my town, but even those don’t kill the seat availability going to SEA from here.
 
Karnage said:
Yeah, jump seat season for my SEA commute is largely over now that cruise season is done. A few blips to come in Jan/Feb when bowl games and golf tournaments come to my town, but even those don’t kill the seat availability going to SEA from here.
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Cruise season is over? News to me. They go to October these days
 
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Roger Roger said:
Cruise season is over? News to me. They go to October these days
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The late sailings from SEA are thinned out, at least in terms of traffic coming from Phoenix, as a lot of schools down here start back up in late July. Yeah sure the boats are still going but the traffic clogging my commute because of them are long past.

Plus my commuter hotel prices are about 40% less, another sign the commute just got easier.
 
The cartoonish nightmare that unfolds at the blue elevators in the parking garage, when the cruise ship buses drop off swarms of overweight mouth breathers has definitely slowed down as of late.
 
bike21 said:
Need KLM loads again since they stopped offering on StaffT.
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Just call their customer service line. They’ve told me loads over the phone several times recently.

luke3 said:
Also, we talk about how many Americans are struggling, but the K-shaped economy is real. There are a lot more rich people than before too and they're buying up premium seats left and right, leaving less for nonrevs. I guess that's a good problem to have, job security in some form for
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This!

Roger Roger said:
Cruise season is over? News to me. They go to October these days
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COMMUTING IS A CHOICE!!!! 😆
 
Skåning said:
Just call their customer service line. They’ve told me loads over the phone several times recently.



This!



COMMUTING IS A CHOICE!!!!
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Forget commuting, I just wanna be able to go downtown without tripping over clueless tourons!

(I won’t do it because I’m valley trash, but the important thing is I could if I wanted to)
 
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BEEF SUPREME said:
The cartoonish nightmare that unfolds at the blue elevators in the parking garage, when the cruise ship buses drop off swarms of overweight mouth breathers has definitely slowed down as of late.
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Haha last time I rode that elevator up, in the heart of this season, one of the FA's in the elevator saw them all trundling very close and hit the "close" button and we thankfully escaped to the 4th floor.
 
killbilly said:
"Welcome to New York. Please do not accept a ride from anyone who approaches you in the terminal."
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I was at work... maybe a month ago? Floating along in "Rich-land" - mindlessly walking out of T5 thinking about something not related to work at all. I must have looked really lost and distracted because one of these "entrepreneurs-of-the-road" came up to me by the baggage carousels and asked me of I needed a ride to somewhere. What? No.

While. I. Was. In. Full. Uniform.

Only in JFK.
 
///AMG said:
Haha last time I rode that elevator up, in the heart of this season, one of the FA's in the elevator saw them all trundling very close and hit the "close" button and we thankfully escaped to the 4th floor.
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One would think the POS would use a different stop for the employees. So the employees AND cruise ship passengers wouldn’t wind up all at the same elevator bank. With 1/2 of the elevators down for maintenance. It didn’t help that the yellow elevators were entirely out of service all summer. Rendering the second bus stop all but useless.

I’m convinced the POS is a psychological warfare experiment and we are the subjects of the testing.
 
///AMG said:
Many Americans are gonna be f***ed very soon. And I'd include the mythical "work from home" crowd allegedly living a nomadic travel life. I think that is probably life blurring with Instagram influencer types more than reality. But anyway, I do think there is an element of more people dropping big coin to have "experiences" as the younger people supposedly prioritize.

But to the point of optimization, that's real too. My FB feed was inundated yesterday with endless 9/11 remembrance stories, and one thing I didn't realize until now was the loads on those flights. I think it was UA93 that had 40 people. 40 freaking people on a transcon WB. That is wild.
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This is the reality of Tuesday flying in the September low-demand period. September is, by far, the worst demand period domestically in the US; and Tuesday is, by far, the worst demand day-of-week. Those two combined make for brutal flights.

Over the years airlines have gotten better about (1) flying less in September broadly, and (2) flying even less on Tuesdays in September, so I doubt the Tuesday transcon load factors are as bad as they used to be. But I'd still bet dollars-to-donuts there are a decent chunk of low (sub-60%) load factor Tuesday transcons flying around as we speak.
 
Ecl!pse said:
This is the reality of Tuesday flying in the September low-demand period. September is, by far, the worst demand period domestically in the US; and Tuesday is, by far, the worst demand day-of-week. Those two combined make for brutal flights.

Over the years airlines have gotten better about (1) flying less in September broadly, and (2) flying even less on Tuesdays in September, so I doubt the Tuesday transcon load factors are as bad as they used to be. But I'd still bet dollars-to-donuts there are a decent chunk of low (sub-60%) load factor Tuesday transcons flying around as we speak.
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Yeah I could see this. I mean, intelligent scheduling/planning only goes so far. I know my vacation time for my first couple years was always in Jan/Feb, and those turned out to be great non rev months aside from a few holiday tangential days like MLK. There definitely are empty planes. I've flown a few of them. It is normally kind of a surprise because they don't tend to be that way for the most part, and while everyone else seems to know a flight is empty before I do and probably has been talking about it in the van since the hotel, that load closeout isn't gonna sneak past me without my noticing :)
 
Ecl!pse said:
This is the reality of Tuesday flying in the September low-demand period. September is, by far, the worst demand period domestically in the US; and Tuesday is, by far, the worst demand day-of-week. Those two combined make for brutal flights.

Over the years airlines have gotten better about (1) flying less in September broadly, and (2) flying even less on Tuesdays in September, so I doubt the Tuesday transcon load factors are as bad as they used to be. But I'd still bet dollars-to-donuts there are a decent chunk of low (sub-60%) load factor Tuesday transcons flying around as we speak.
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Anecdotal but after my initual commute to visit my mom fell part (thanks metering to ORD) I'm now on a Delta neo going SEA-BOS and I got a choice of an aisle seat in comfort+ or an aisle seat with nobody next to me in economy... and it's a Tuesday in September.

Although my original Alaska flight to Chicago was oversold... so who know?
 
San Diego was an overcrowded dumpster fire on a Monday afternoon. It was difficult to walk from gate 28 to 31. PAX were standing shoulder to shoulder. There was no room to walk from gate to gate.
 
There's always myUAdiscount too, assuming other airlines have similar to UA. I make less than most of you for sure and even with child support and having to fly to Fresno, Minneapolis, and Cebu often (Jeddah before that), I'm almost flipping Star Alliance Gold lol. I mean SFO-FAT for example is usually $350-600 one way to keep those seats open for juicy connecting fares from EU, Asia, and other places. With myUAdiscount, its $128-160 usually. If a few days out its already over 75% full, I just buy a ticket. $175 usually MSP-SFO, so since I fly in then work a few hours later, I buy a ticket for protection in case it cancels or I need a reroute or OAL rebook. •, SFO-MNL is like $358 in economy and I did Polaris MNL-SFO like $1700 which is a STEAL when you won't get it standby.

At age 36, I'm 100% "shut up and take my money" over the nonrev game if its reasonable. Dunno why pilots are so cheap, I mean you got there, you're getting paper, buy your commute tickets home and chill out. I get upgraded over 50% of the time I buy a ticket now.
 
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