Originally Posted by
bjones4
LHR-ABZ-LHR seems to be being reduced from seven to six a day with the late evening roundtrip being chopped ...... I was due to go on the last MAN-LHR of the day on October 30th (BA1407) however I got an email today saying it's cancelled
As one who used to do analysis of travel patterns, this can be a shortsighted economy. We found that in many cases (we mainly looked at commuter rail but some long distance stuff as well) the late/last services might not have fully commercial loads. However they were supporting the rest of the service as passengers would use the rest of the service, in the knowledge that if they were delayed or had to work late, it was there to fall back on, and periodically they would do so.
Eliminating the last trip of the day would change this perception and you could lose many more passengers than that last evening service seemed to carry. It was supporting loads on the rest of the service which were not apparent from its actual loadings. If it was taking 50 passengers and you cancelled it, you might expect the service overall to lose 100 passengers.
It is also the case that the last trip of the day takes a high proportion of business day-return traffic, which is some of the highest yielding.
You would expect BA to understand such aspects of transport economics and have people knowledgeable in these areas, but my suspicion is that the office-politics crew at Waterside, those for whom anything that cannot be expressed in one page from a spreadsheet is too difficult, have marginalised and leaned the operation by seeing those who do know one end of a plane from the other as easy targets to get rid of.