Just a quick one for merchant...Just a quick one for merchant...
No offence old pal (cos you know ur stuff!), but you rely a hell of a lot on figures.
I can assure you that figures are 'tweaked' all the time!
WindSheer,
I accept what you say about figures being 'tweaked' because you are in the business and I'm not so clearly I am therefore in a position not to be able to argue.
Presumably this tweaking is done to the advantage of the airport/airline doing the tweaking. If so, one must assume that all airlines/airports are at it, in which case the relative positions of the various airlines/airports versus rivals would still be roughly the same unless some are better tweakers than others.
Or are you saying the tweaking is so violent that officially published figures, even by someone like the CAA, have no basis or value?
It would be instructive to have a hypothetical example of how the tweaking works, or is it simply a crude tool of adding (or even substracting) a certain percentage of passengers from a route or airport during a given time?