Karnage
I-am-a-pirate. I do not need credentials!
Back when non-reving on TWA was still a thing, flights weren’t full. Outside of holidays and summer vacation load factors averaged in the low 60% range. Certain routes and cities were avoided at different times of the day or week, but you could pretty much non-rev anywhere without much worry about getting on as long as you didn’t mind taking the early morning flights or maybe waiting til the second connecting flight. You never needed backups and the only reason you got ZED fares (well, IDs because ZEDs didn’t exist outside Europe) was because your airline didn’t fly there.
Starting in 2004-2005 airlines started getting “capacity discipline” and worked to fill their flights more. Still, LFs overall hovered in the low 80s and while you definitely had to be more selective about your flights, it wasn’t bad. Hell, prior to the merger I never non-rev’ed in coach on Delta unless it was an RJ or a Shuttle plane. Maybe like 10% of the time I wouldn’t get first.
After the financial crisis airlines got good at filling the planes year round and not just the old holiday flights. System load factors crept up into the low and mid 90s and have only crept higher. Revenue management has always been good at matching demand to availability, but airlines today are hyper focused and unlike 20 years ago when they would use those high performers to subsidize the struggling routes, today they just cut the slackers and move on. It’s great for the paycheck, and it has overall lessened a lot of the financial ups and downs for the carriers and their employees. But it’s made non-reving a vastly less valuable benefit. I mean sure, I don’t have to put on my Sunday best to fly to Peoria anymore, but I also can’t make plans to go to Rome in July without 10 OAL ZED fares and being willing to route my way home via São Paulo and Anchorage to get back.
It leads to another rant of mine. Yeah seats have gotten a little thinner over the last 50 years as technology has improved, but it’s not the ever shrinking airline seat that makes flying less comfortable. It’s the fact that unlike 1990 where you could almost be guaranteed an empty middle or even your own row on every single flight, flights today will have every seat occupied. The tubes haven’t gotten smaller, and it’s not really that we’ve gotten fatter (though we have), we’re just not flying around empty seats any more.
Starting in 2004-2005 airlines started getting “capacity discipline” and worked to fill their flights more. Still, LFs overall hovered in the low 80s and while you definitely had to be more selective about your flights, it wasn’t bad. Hell, prior to the merger I never non-rev’ed in coach on Delta unless it was an RJ or a Shuttle plane. Maybe like 10% of the time I wouldn’t get first.
After the financial crisis airlines got good at filling the planes year round and not just the old holiday flights. System load factors crept up into the low and mid 90s and have only crept higher. Revenue management has always been good at matching demand to availability, but airlines today are hyper focused and unlike 20 years ago when they would use those high performers to subsidize the struggling routes, today they just cut the slackers and move on. It’s great for the paycheck, and it has overall lessened a lot of the financial ups and downs for the carriers and their employees. But it’s made non-reving a vastly less valuable benefit. I mean sure, I don’t have to put on my Sunday best to fly to Peoria anymore, but I also can’t make plans to go to Rome in July without 10 OAL ZED fares and being willing to route my way home via São Paulo and Anchorage to get back.
It leads to another rant of mine. Yeah seats have gotten a little thinner over the last 50 years as technology has improved, but it’s not the ever shrinking airline seat that makes flying less comfortable. It’s the fact that unlike 1990 where you could almost be guaranteed an empty middle or even your own row on every single flight, flights today will have every seat occupied. The tubes haven’t gotten smaller, and it’s not really that we’ve gotten fatter (though we have), we’re just not flying around empty seats any more.
