Do premium seats attract more passengers? (vs. a carpet-bomb slot block)

[esquireflyer]

The manual says that if other things are equal (and now, basically everyone sets default pricing), the passengers will prefer a flight that has premium seating rather than standard seating. But many people have told me that premium seats have no effect other than to reduce capacity, and don't actually attract more pax.

I am currently flying a route that is oversupplied, BOS-LHR (by a factor of about 3x).
My load factors are only around 60%, but the flights are still profitable because my C and F cabins are selling around 80% full.

But I am wondering if it is possible to get the low LF (about 50%) in the Y cabin up.

Adding more frequencies isn't really a viable option because:
(1) I already have two-thirds of the market share on this route, so adding a flight would take from my own business more than it would take from competitors' business.
(2) One of my competitors, based in LHR, is carpet-bombing the LHR slots, so it is basically impossible for me to add any more flights to LHR. He is flying four flights BOS-LHR, nose-to-tail, all at the exact the same time, so he takes 4 slots in that hour. And he is doing the same thing on his other routes at different times of day (up to 6 simultaneous flights to the same destination in the same time slot), thus making it basically impossible for me to add frequencies.

So, if I change to premium seats, will I attract more Y pax (numerically)? Or will the game give me the same load factor percentage, which translates into a lower number of pax (numerically)? Or no effect at all?

Thanks!

[exchlbg]

At first two things come to mind:
1.Your competitor gives you advantage already because he plays against the rule of spreading flights.Multiple departures at the same time are counted as one.
2.If you lower the number of seats by upgrading them your load factor would rise even with same passenger number (pure math).

Why should you carry less passengers after upgrading? Your eco cabin now is 40% empty, so there is a lot of space for better seats.
You don´t really know if your competitor is default pricing. I think people are willing to pay more for better seating especially on long-haul.
So either you should carry more passengers in number with same pricing or you can rise your fees with the same number.I would give it a shot.

Greeting
Christian

[Sigma]

(2) One of my competitors, based in LHR, is carpet-bombing the LHR slots, so it is basically impossible for me to add any more flights to LHR. He is flying four flights BOS-LHR, nose-to-tail, all at the exact the same time, so he takes 4 slots in that hour. And he is doing the same thing on his other routes at different times of day (up to 6 simultaneous flights to the same destination in the same time slot), thus making it basically impossible for me to add frequencies.

Just to clarify what exchlbg has said:  Whenever someone does that (puts many flights at the same or nearly the same time) they're actually doing themselves a lot of harm.  The game will actually count that as a single departure.  It's a mechanic to keep people from spamming flights on a route to eat up slots or consume all the demand by flying at a single time of day over and over as a means of utilizing the planes elsewhere at 'better' times.  Exactly how close the flights need to be before they're affected by this depends on the overall demand of the route.  For a sufficiently dense route, a 15-min departure window is fine.  For very thin routes, you may need to separate your flights by a couple hours.

As for  your actual question:  do better seats matter?  Yes.  But not very much.  More frequency is a MUCH better investment if you're trying to gain market share.  Whatever additional share you'll get due to superior seating will be fairly small.  Unless we're talking about high-density seating on 2-hr flights, in which case offering a superior seating alternative will be very large.  It also seems to be somewhat worthwhile on very long flights to go above standard seating.  But on normal domestic flights, the difference between standard and the next-up isn't worth the money unless it's the only option you've got left to compete to gain share.

[esquireflyer]

Thanks for the explanation!

What about a route like Boston to Haneda (via Fairbanks), vs. 1 competitor (via Anchorage), where the route is supplied at ~150% between the two of us. Suppose I am only getting 40% to 50% load factors (rather than the expected 75% if we filled the whole demand and evenly split it).

If I switch to premium seats in F, C, and Y, will that help me attract more passengers? It cuts my capacity by about 1/3, but those excess seats are not being sold anyway under the current model.

Will switching to premium seats sell more tickets in this situation?