dojetdriver

Non Revenue. You are an employee, the spouse, child, dependent of the employee, etc. OR, you are riding on a buddy pass, ZED, ID90 ticket.

Your seat is not generating any revenue for the airline.

Thats how it ends up sometimes. There are times when you get treated awesome when non-revving/JS'ing, others it's been just as it sounds. Your not revenue or a customer.

ewrbasedpilot

Yesterday one of the gate agents pulled up CAL airfares from BOS-EWR-BOS .........$77 and that included taxes (yes that was ROUND TRIP). Our buddy pass is $101.50 each way and you are lower than whale snot on the food chain with one of those!!! Some benefit, eh? FLL to EWR was just a tad over $80. The brilliant minds setting airfares must be the same people running AIG. You can't even get a cab from JFK to EWR for under $100. Nice to be able to give the flying public such an incredible value so they can complain about everything once they get on........................

deltabound

Although it seems unreasonable, the real questions to ask are "How many of the seats were sold at that fare?", quickly followed by "When did x number of seats become available for that price?" I suspect the answer is "very, very few."

Once the plane is committed to flying, it makes no sense to have an empty seat, even if it means charging very little for a ticket. That said, transparency in the fare structure is not without some value; American used to be the absolute king of "yield management" and ulta-honed fare structures, and it got to the point that it was driving passengers into the arms of the LCC's (i.e. Southwest and their 3 tier price plan).

Besides, most passengers don't complain about everything. They complain about unexpected inconveniences. They'll deal with small seats and full planes, but god help you if you lose their bag or cancel their flight due to a mechanical.

ewrbasedpilot

Due to the frequency and number of aircraft on the short haul routes EWR/JFK to BOS, quite a few tickets are sold at those prices. The NY-FL market is also saturated, so a LOT of tickets go at the lower prices. We have 8-12 flights a day to FLL, and I've ridden the JS probably 98% of the time for the past six months. You'd think we'd make just a LITTLE bit of money with load factors like that, wouldn't you?