Hi everyone,
What are the average load factors for the largest airlines here?
Just to get an idea, because I do see airlines with load factors of 95%+, but those are airlines with few aircraft.
I can't imagine you could achieve that with 1,000+ aircraft.
Last week, I had a few flights rebooked onto a smaller aircraft—which, given the load factors of the previous aircraft type, should have been full, but that wasn't the case.
Well, everything does indeed depend on various factors: competition, aircraft type, etc.
It's really time for them to offer more options on the flights, such as letting passengers organize their own catering, so there are more opportunities to compete.
Also, the design of the seats, etc.,
You should not chase high load factor, but a high profit/revenue instead.
Flying a full plane (95%+ LF) means you'd be charging too little of the tickets.
Hey Sami,
That was also the goal: to address the cost-to-revenue ratio and thus increase profits.
But you'd think that, since the other aircraft type had only a 50% load factor on a certain route, you'd achieve a higher load factor by deploying a smaller aircraft
We're talking about two flights each for a 735 and an F10 with load factors between 30% and 50%, compared to barely 60% to 65% now for my SB20.
But the profit margin is higher than before anyway—that was the main goal.
just like in the real world (British Airways v Laker, British Airways v Virgin Atlantic) a large airline will use it's size to try and make life difficult for awkward smaller rivals. So the big airline will have routes that print cash, and this cash will be used to operate extra flights on routes where the desire is to make sure competitors are not making a lot of money, so cannot expand So operating a flight with low LFs may still be a good decision for a big airline even though it's not making much money for anybody. AWS is a competitive game, so it's good business to dominate an airport and discourage new entrants and make life awkward for competitors.
profit margin is driven by many things, the largest of which after LF is capital cost of aircraft. So if you can lease bits of rubbish for 50K/month vs a shiny A321 for 1million/month that will have a significant impact on the cost of operating the route. Bear in mind the route and aircraft stats do not include the cost of personnel in their figures. And personnel typically make up 30% of an airlines total costs. So 1xA321 daily with 196 seats may actually be cheaper than needing to operate and staff 4xCRJ700 (50 seats) to carry the same number of pax. Though the CRJ700 has the benefit of using more slots thus denying them to your competitors, though slots can be expensive.
Load factor is simply math representing number of seats sold divided by number of seats available.
If you sell 100 seats on a route, you could fly the same plane with 100 seats on it or 200 seats (in this case, same plane type with different seat configurations) on it and you'd end up at the same revenue/cost for the flight, but a much different load factor.
Your objective of revenue is about selling seats, not load factor. You look at demand, your pricing, and the other variables involved in selling seats and do your best there.
Your cost objective is matching the best plane type considering the rest of your airline's needs to haul as many sold seats as you can for the lowest amount of money.
Load factor gives you nothing except 1. the achievement awards available for it 2. Your stats rankings for that statistic. 3. A quick benchmark that may flag a route that needs your attention (e.g. 100% load factor consistently implies you need more seats, higher ticket prices or both).