Originally Posted by
nomess
...
It wouldn’t shock me if the revenue from your cancelled flight a few months in the future has already been spent trying to pay yesterday’s bills.
...
The pretty much industry standard fix for a pending short-term cash flow problem is to run a "sale" offering cheaper fares, available for a strictly limited period (48 or 72 hours), for flights as far forward as the punter can reasonably plan (next school holidays, for instance). Cash today, worries sometime later.
If the sale gets "extended", you know they haven't hit their cash flow target.
I should caveat that by saying that not all "sales" are launched just to fix short-term cash flow.