Selling seats on positioning / ferry flights
I realise that from time to time, passenger airlines need to move aircraft while empty around their network to have them in the right place to be available to transport fare paying passengers for various reasons. Apart from aircraft maintenance and crew training purposes, a planned-in-advance example might be a specific sports event with fans expecting to spend more than a day at a specific venue.
Clearly positioning flights flown at very short notice to pick up stranded pax because an aircraft is inoperable somewhere else in the network will never have fare paying customers. However, when a positioning flight is known well in advance and occurs over a route of non-trivial distance, what are the commercial realities around trying to sell some seats to the public in the hope of raising a bit of extra revenue ? I realise that insurance is not free, EU261 generally makes things less flexible, and passengers cannot be given seats without cabin crew being on duty, all of which increases cost beyond a purely positioning flight
Is it generally a hopeless cause, or can an airline flying an aircraft under 100 seats at small airports sometimes reasonably hope to end up better off than never having tried to sell seats in the first place ?
Last edited by davidjohnson6; 18th Feb 2015 at 00:46.