sdbelgium wrote:These b.flex tickets were probably sold for rock bottom prices to Club Med. To leisure destinations such as Athens or Seville, where b.light capacity is obviously needed, these Club Med passenger might end up taking seats that could have been sold for a much higher price to 'regular' revenue b.flex passengers. Not that I'm hoping for it, but I can imagine this can be the situation in some cases.
Of course package deals like these come at a reduced price, what did you expect?
The more seats you buy, the better the price gets; try booking tickets for a group of 10 pax online for instance? You're not even able to do so! As from 10 pax, you'll need to contact SN first and they'll quote a price for you, which is far better than what you'd get through the internet. Try it, if you don't believe me.... .
The interesting part to note here is the undeniable trend happening right now in that ever increasing numbers of seats on SN flights are indeed constantly going to be blocked out for individual point-to-point sales in future, either through increased numbers of codeshare-agreements with STAR alliance partners (on the many business destinations SN serve) or by tourists (on predominantly leasure destinations).
As you point out, this means SN would be having less seats to offer itself to the individual traveller... unless they increase the seating capacity of their fleet.
Coincidentally, isn't this matching exactly what I've said is the new LH fostered strategy of SN all along?
That the aim is to go to bigger planes on average?
The most heared remark is: "Heck they can't even fill an RJ, why the hell would they need more bigger planes and where are they going to find the extra pax to fill them?"
The answer should be pretty obvious now, doesn't it?
They need extra capacity not so much for the domestic point-to-point market but to accomodate pax sent to them by the ever increasing numbers of partners, be it STAR ALLIANCE or CLUB MED and for that they logically need bigger planes indeed, otherwise they would just distroy their yields.
Consider the idea of operating bigger planes however and you can keep the yield of the ptp traffic up, all while adding the revenues of the extra pax without any problem in return for a marginal operating cost increase and a seriously reduced unit cost even, thus considerably reducing the bottom line of the operations.
