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[quote quote=850246]Do airlines really compete on an hourly basis against competitors fares?[/quote]
No, they sell seats in real time and have a bucket load of route history and algorithms that support this.
Airlines really only endeavour to fill their’planes and thats their main priority.
There’s a bit more to it than that, yield is just as important as load, if not more so.
Yield is to make profits and that’s what additional costs provide in full fare Economy, Economy+, Business and First, and now ancillary income.
Does any major airline,other than the LCCs sell below cost? It would be a poor business plan if they did.
Even sales are unlikely to be below cost and used only to fill seats out of season.
Do airlines really compete on an hourly basis against competitors fares?
Yes, they have robotic systems (I think they are called screenscrapers) which trawl airline and OLTA sites and feed that in to their own RM systems.
As for filling flights, that’s not an objective, it’s filling flights at good yields. You could sell every seat on every flight if they were cheap enough. For a number of reasons that would spell a rapid demise for that airline.