Sell C/F seats as Y when no C/F demand

[raptorva]

I would love to see some sort of in between "Premium Economy" style that could serve such a purpose. An increasingly large number of airlines in the real world are providing greater volumes of this class seating in their cabins for the same reason, offering a product that's better than that basic level but not quite to business level, but could appeal to business travelers say in game if there isn't a true C cabin available.

[qunow]

I would love to see some sort of in between "Premium Economy" style that could serve such a purpose. An increasingly large number of airlines in the real world are providing greater volumes of this class seating in their cabins for the same reason, offering a product that's better than that basic level but not quite to business level, but could appeal to business travelers say in game if there isn't a true C cabin available.

I would say that is more have to do with economy class being pushed to maximal economy and business class being pushed to maximum comfort and they found offering a product inbetween can attract those inbetweener and achieve profit maximization so that have little to do with the topic here....

[BullRot]

It would be maybe very hard to code, but maybe a special system could be put in place, if supply is much lower than demand (lets say demand is 220) and aircraft has for example 100Y 10C, then some Y would take a C to get there fast....even if there were any for C demand.... Sometimes is how it works in real life example during holidays with special fares....
This could work for C (maybe price should be automatically lowered to half or just equal Y) without making extra profit, but not for F which is exclusive.

[Michael J Toffman]

+1

[qunow]

+1

Just click the "like this post" button if you simply want to +1

[Zobelle]

It would be maybe very hard to code, but maybe a special system could be put in place, if supply is much lower than demand (lets say demand is 220) and aircraft has for example 100Y 10C, then some Y would take a C to get there fast....even if there were any for C demand.... Sometimes is how it works in real life example during holidays with special fares....
This could work for C (maybe price should be automatically lowered to half or just equal Y) without making extra profit, but not for F which is exclusive.

Operational upgrades.

[Michael J Toffman]

Yes they do (see below), although they don't advertise it as a C seat for a Y price.
This tends to happen on US airlines, but employees flying for free in C does not usually happen on Asian airlines, like SQ, for example.
If the purpose is to protect the "integrity" of the C cabin, giving it to an employee who paid nothing is even worse than giving it to a customer who paid a Y fare.

On intra-Europe flights like in the OP's example, European airlines can usually convert Y seats to C seats and back again between flights, because the "C" offered on such flights is just a Y seat with the middle seat in each row blocked. 

It does happen on real airlines. The key is that tickets do not stop being sold for Y class when it fills up. Instead, the airline oversells Y, as long as there is room in C (and maybe a little more, depending on the airline's expectation of no-shows in Y), and oversells C as long as there is room in F.

And then, at the airport, when 150 Y pax show up for 144 Y seats, and meanwhile 10 C seats are empty, guess what happens?

Six Y pax get operationally upgraded into C.

Depending on the airline's rules (and the employees' decision to follow/break the rules), it could be the highest-tier frequent fliers, or the passengers who paid the highest Y fares (since unlike in AWS, real-life Y pax pay a variety of fares), the pax who checked in the latest, or just total luck of the draw (e.g the pax who happened to be at the podium).

And so, in effect, the airline literally does sell C seats as Y seats, although they only offer a Y seat up front, and convert it to a C seat on the back end. They try to be discreet about it, and they don't make any promises. If there are cancellations, and Y turns out not to be oversold, no one gets upgraded.

So, the net result of the above (without all the complex intermediate steps) could simply be modeled in AWS by allowing C seats to be sold at Y prices when C is undersold (or there is no C demand on the route) but there is more Y demand than Y seats.

Currently, on a route with no C demand, even if you manually set C prices at the same price as Y, no one will buy C.

And ever since domestic F demand was eliminated from the US and EU international flights (btw, Sami, can you please confirm officially whether this is a glitch or a permanent change that we should adapt our strategies to accomodate?) if you price F below Y and C, no one will buy F, even if Y and C are completely sold out. This is not a realistic result at all, and it creates huge headaches when an international plane has a domestic leg as part of its schedule. In real life, a lot of the int'l F and C seats would be sold at Y fares, through (1) the operation of frequent-flier upgrades, (2) overbooking Y and operational upgrades, and (3) the cheapie first-class buy-ups that United/Continental is starting to offer these days because they have recently decided that they would rather nickel and dime the Y pax than give a free upgrade to a frequent flier.

Yes, this is all correct. I've been upgraded multiple times to C class before/while boarding, as airlines oversell Y class and fill the empty premium seats in order to sell more Y seats. They'll never tell you this though.

[DanDan]

id like this! and it is adding realism.

also got upgraded quite a few times from y to c and once even from c to f (thanks BA! )

[cwburnett]

While accounting for situations like operational upgrades might be a challenge to code, perhaps a simpler solution (that I think would be relatively easy to accommodate with the existing interface) would be, for a given route/flight, to choose to sell one cabin as a lower cabin.  This could be simply accommodated with a check box next to where the fare is indicated.

Example 1: Plane configured with 140Y and 12C; I could select, for that route, instead of entering a fare for Business Class to check a box that says "Sell Business as Economy" - and the business seats would just be counted as economy seats on that route, so I'd be selling 152Y seats on that flight.

Example 2: Plane configured with 160Y, 15C, F5; I could select to sell F as C and C as Y, making it 175Y and 15C.

For a real world reference, AA used to sell the C cabin as Y on all their 3-class 772s for domestic flights.  Not upgrades, they were just sold as Y seats.  They were flagged as 'premium' so only bookable by frequent flyers, but they were otherwise no different than Y seats from a revenue management perspective.

For another real world reference, OZ regularly sells their F cabins as J on intra-asia flights.  I've been on two flights where this was the case - a 744 and a 772, where the entire F cabin was sold as J and offered, again, to frequent flyers.

By making this an all-or-nothing choice when creating/editing the route, it should make it relatively more easy to implement than trying to code in some logic for paid upgrades or opups.

[JumboShrimp]

I think @cwburnett solution is not as flexible as what @EsquireFlyer envisions (automatic upgrades), @cwburnett may offer a virtual configuration of aircraft that may work well with what the system already has, will be much simpler to program.

Right now we have under "Capacity Limits" a single limit:

Block seats to max capacity of X seats 


The Capacity Limits could be expanded to 4 fields (using numbers in my example):

Sell 2 F seats as C seats
Sell 0 F seats as Y seats
Sell 10 C seats as Y seats
Block Y seats to max capacity of 0 Y seats  (zero means no blocking takes place)


So for example, I have started with an A321 configured as Y156 C15 F3
I would end up with a configuration of Y168 C7 F1

Another example, trying to gain a bit more cargo space.  Starting an A321 configured as Y156 C15 F3

Sell 3 F seats as C seats
Sell 0 F seats as Y seats
Sell 10 C seats as Y seats
Block Y seats to max capacity of 100 Y seats

I would end up with a configuration of 100 C5 F0 and some extra cargo space.

[MidWorld]

Upgrades could be programmed to bring a modest financial result, as pax pay Y while consuming the cost of C, etc.

[wilian.souza2]

I still think there shouldn't have routes with 1 or 2 or 3 business passengers, so I proposed something different some time ago - to convert business demand less than 5 to economy demand, just like it happens with some class of cargo which amount is less than a minimum.

Or we can take a different approach to business and 1st class passengers - create conditions which airlines could generate demand for these classes of passengers over time, be it by some airline offering these seats, or heavy competition making demand more selective and prone to buying higher class seats and the like. In this case, the number of business and 1st class seats would not be known firsthand.