Originally Posted by
bobleeds
No RYR for me,
Having read many of wawkrk's well informed posts on this board, I'm sure he does not need to do any homework on Yield Management.
Perhaps the same cannot be said for KLM sales, because at the price of £1,200 those seats will be the highest yielding empty seats on the aircraft.
It's pretty easy to kick revenue management, but one piece of information we're missing is how far in advance of travel the original poster is booking. Several carriers I know of (Aer Lingus for one, potentially KLM for another) set their premium economy/full flex fare at a single level and don't change it as they get closer to the date of travel. That means that the premium economy fare looks completely uncompetitive until a few days before travel, when the economy fare has climbed far enough to catch up with it.
If I look at the fares for LBA-AMS-LBA for tomorrow, the cheapest economy round-trip fare is STG£537.50. At that point, the option of paying another £62.50 to get lounge access, fast track, full refundability, etc, doesn't look quite so stupid.
Now of course you can reasonably argue that an airline
should offer advance-purchase premium-economy fares, and I wouldn't disagree, but it seems to me that right now KLM (or Aer Lingus, as the other example I know of) is choosing to make their Europe Select fares attractive only for late bookers.
C.