Originally Posted by
davidjohnson6
If an airline says to me "the aircraft and crew are all available; maybe we fly in the morning, or maybe we fly in the evening instead.... or perhaps we might not fly until tomorrow - we will tell you when we make up our minds", my reaction would be "OK, my time is valuable to me, my need to fly with your company is not critical and I don't have confidence that you will make a good faith attempt at what you said you would do in the marketing about a scheduled flight departure time, so I won't buy a ticket".
The last time I saw an airline giving complete fantasy flight times was in Somalia.... I don't expect a schedule 6 months away with Covid but just 3 weeks ahead of a flight date, major airlines in Europe should be able to communicate a roughly accurate plan
BA are not doing last minute cancellations to my knowledge. All schedule changes are made at least 2 weeks out, for obvious reasons.
Schedule changes are largely driven by customer booking behaviour and government restrictions. Neither of which are under the control of any airline or predictable with traditional revenue management models.
You only have to see the announcement by easyJet today that they will reduce flights to the Greek islands in the wake of UK government restrictions to see this isn’t solely a BA issue. Every airline is in the same boat. In an environment of massively reduced revenue and demand, the fastest way to lose money is to fly empty aircraft around the skies. And every airline is trying to limit losses.
Any airline schedule is no doubt published in the expectation that it will operate, they need it to do so in order to make morey. As the date approaches and it becomes apparent that it would be a massive financial loss, it’s not unreasonable to expect changes. This is unpredictable and unprecedented. All bets are off.