Originally Posted by
Cyrano
Somehow I don't think you've experienced the charter airline/tour operator interface directly. It's not quite as simple as you seem to think for an airline (especially a relatively new, non-established one) to dictate what days it'll fly on.
For those of us who do have an inkling of the process, we still noticed that Eirjet managed to sell capacity at weekends but not so well midweek, whereas other operators carried on with the 7-day operations they have done for years now.
There is indeed the market, especially on the longer European routes such as the Canaries, for weekday traffic. The days of demand for each destination are well known and quite obvious. But what seems the case here is that Eirjet, like so many smaller operators before them, have misjudged how much all-week, let alone all-year, traffic they could capture. They have acted as a "top up" to supply rather than having a full programme. And so you end up with short weeks and short seasons. And this is all down to their commercial team.
Further they then programmed some notably packed flying programmes into weekends to squeeze the revenue up, no slack at all, which a more established charter operator would no doubt consider impractical. That one extra rotation in the weekend is probably dearly bought as you end up with considerable disorganisation and bad will all round.