Entre la violencia como realidad y su lente de interpretación

The preceding analysis examined the acceptance of flexible products on Intra-European flights with a length of three flight hours. This setting has been chosen since the qualitative pre-study revealed that on shorter routes, the potential inclusion of a connection flight in the flexible product set would lead to a disproportionate prolongation of the overall travel time in comparison to a direct flight. Based on these preferences, it would be advisable to exclude connection flights from the set of potential flights that form a flexible time-range ticket on short O&Ds which are also served by non-stop flights. Irrespective of the route lengths, the simulation results also point out that the largest possibility airlines have to increase the acceptance of flexible time-range tickets is to limit the potential flights to non-stop flights. Thereby, on short routes flexible products could be used on all O&Ds where an airline group offers several flights a day.

When it comes to less traveled O&Ds, passengers are often used to transferring flights in order to reach their final destination. As a result, passengers usually can chose from several transfer hubs and - due to this strong competition - the importance of the price increases: “Often the price elasticity of demand is higher for travel in through markets than in point-to-point markets to or from hubs.”⁴⁸⁴ While single airlines usually do not offer enough connections in an acceptable time-range in order to market them as flexible products, airline groups together usually provide enough connection flights to offer time-range tickets as a cheap option for through markets (cf. for instance the offer of nine daily Lufthansa or partner airlines flights with not more than one connection between Bucharest and Gothenburg as shown in Table 2).

Besides selecting routes which qualify for the offer of flexible products, it also has to be decided, whether this kind of ticket should be constantly offered, or whether the offer should be temporarily limited. As pointed out before, flexible products can on the one

482 Even on low demand flights, flexible products can be beneficial, since the degradation of the product allows the airline to offer lower prices which are able to induce additional demand (cf. also Gallego et al.

(2004), p. 36) without lowering the reference price level of regular tickets (cf. Diller / Jöhler (2008), p. 357ff).

483 Petrick et al. (2009), p. 22

484 Hanlon (2007), p. 118

hand serve as a means to induce additional demand, and on the other hand support a more balanced usage of capacity by shifting passengers from flights with high demand to flights with low demand. If an airline primarily wants to induce additional demand (without eroding the price of its specified product) it could use flexible products during all times. However, if the main aim is to achieve a more balanced demand allocation, flexible time-range tickets are only reasonable if at least one of the flights in the product set is sometimes subject to more demand than there is capacity for (which translates into a load factor of 100%).

Given the sensitive nature of load factor data in a competitive environment it is not surprising that airlines in general only publish aggregated load factor data. In 2007 the airlines of the Association of European Airlines published a load factor of 70% on European routes and approximately 80% on long-haul routes.⁴⁸⁵ However, given the strong variances in demand between seasons, weekdays and even time periods during the day (cf. chapter 2.5.3), it is obvious that in order to reach an average load factor of 70%, many flights have to be operated close to full capacity. Wensveen (2007) for instance presents the empirical example of a Boeing 757 routing during two days in summer. In total, the aircraft has been flying 15 flight legs on these days and reached an average load factor of 60%. However, this average is composed of eight flights which had a load factor of more than 75% (at least one of these flights was even so heavily overbooked that the airline had to turn some passengers away), three flights which had a load factor around 50% and four flights that experienced load factors between 15-45%.⁴⁸⁶

On a broader scale, Malighetti et al. (2009) examined all flights of the leading LCC Ryanair from July 2005 until June 2006 in order to find out how often a flight is fully booked. They concluded that around 15% of all flights are fully booked (cf. also Figure 85).⁴⁸⁷

485 Cf. AEA (2007), p. 5 & 15

486 Cf. Wensveen (2007), p. 192

487 Cf. Malighetti / Paleari / Redondi (2009), p. 201

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tickets with a relatively long notice period (e.g. one week) as a means to induce additional demand without having to compromise the overall fare level. In case of a rather poor forecast quality, a short notice period (e.g. one day) should be selected, since this allows shifting flexible bookings in order to fill seats which contrary to expectations are still available shortly before departure.