Originally Posted by
sailingfun
We dropped SVO because we were losing big money, much of it caused by fluctuations in the ruble. We would sell a ticket in the morning at what we thought was a profit and it would be a big loss in the afternoon.
We set a alltime record for transatlantic flights last summer. We will easily break the record this coming summer.
The ruble has been fairly stable over the last 1-2 years. While its fluctuations may exceed the standard deviation of the USD/Euro, its not really an outlier compared to many other currencies our fares are priced to already. And fluctuation really doesn't mean much up and down its own average because for every time you lose on a short term downward fluctuation you by definition win on the next upcycle shortly thereafter. Meanwhile, our partners are making it work somehow and I bet there's still around an ER's worth of US-SVO pax a day and ditto for some (not all) of the other markets in question.
At the end of the day I agree its not about any particular destination. Its just frustrating to see supply and demand cited as reasoning for pulling service down yet our partners still move tons of metal and pax to those same destinations with a large share of US pax.