Originally Posted by
srjumbo747
Let’s just face it that low cost long haul doesn’t work.
People Express, Laker’s Skytrain, Zoom, others which I’ve forgotten and now Norwegian.
It's not just low-cost long haul that doesn't work, but single-market long haul. The high end transatlantic operators of a few years ago went the same way.
The fact is that a typical legacy long haul flight has a mix of low end, median (eg business travellers in Economy) and premium passengers, plus substantial belly cargo, with O&D, plus connecting pax at both ends, plus significant marketing, plus major corporate deals for substantial users, plus very substantial and honed frequent flyer programmes, plus expert yield managers getting as much as they can out of each.
From all of this, they just manage to do a bit better than break even. Meanwhile the new contenders are missing one or more of these elements (some quite a lot), and then on what elements they do have, offer fares which are lower than those of the operator above, and thus give less revenue. What's not to understand ?