Originally Posted by
172skychicken
Jetblue is flying an A321 with 138 seats to London. 24 of those are the lie-flat mint product. They aren't going to be making any money in that configuration by trashing the yields. I think you are dramatically overestimating the CASM advantage over a 280 seat A339 or even a 240 seat 767-400. I just don't buy the A321 as a widebody killer over the Atlantic when the 757 also had a similar mission profile with similar theoretical CASM advantages over the widebodies of that generation.
Yet you can Shirley see the advantage a 321XLR(etc) has over a 757 in costs right?
One flight a day with 24 lay flats is 8760 seats a year. Then its 2, 3, 4, 5 flights a day out of NYC and BOS. Then its a similar amount to DUB, CDG and maybe a few others and soon you have 50-100K lay flats a year flooding the TA market, plus over 4 times that many in economy. And that's even assuming they are the only ones that try it. And we can add some cargo onto that as well, times the number of flights. All of that (lay flat, economy and even limited cargo) will come straight off the bottom lines of existing legacy yields.
Its not that the plane used is a "widebody killer" but the model itself is a yield killer. Traditionally legacy marketing loves to surrender some capacity to that kind of pressure to preserve on paper per flight near term profits even though its a guaranteed loss in the long run.
We don't know for sure how legacy marketing will respond to this particular threat this time. Failing to brief the threat and come up with a plan to mitigate it only amplifies the danger.