Virgin started flying in 1984, on one route with one leased jetliner.
On routes with a high no-show rate, an airline may sell twice as many tickets as it has seats.
The airline removed several rows of coach seats from flights on routes with high volume in business travel, reconfiguring planes to create more legroom for everybody.
Customers have the most bargaining power in situations where "there aren't a lot of simple options to rebook the passengers," like on routes with limited air service, said Dave Pelter, chief executive of InsideTrip.com.
Most of the trips last five or six days, on routes with varying degrees of difficulty: "We can give you something close to the Tour de France, if you wish," Mr. Toutain boasted.
But SkyTeam's members are less glittery: passengers on routes with Air France or Delta flight numbers may actually find themselves aboard planes operated by Russia's still-notorious Aeroflot or the crash-prone China Airlines.
However, in practice, large ships are deployed on routes with high frequencies as well (e.g. Dover - Calais).
The empirical model also finds that on routes with low-cost airlines market concentration is smaller and there is a larger number of flights.
The disadvantage of the extra travel time incurred by passengers in a sparse hub network, on routes with low passenger demand, is outweighed by increased accessibility and lower fares.
When CO2 emissions are stored in the region itself, cost could be lowered by up to 20% on routes with low transport volumes and in a complementary way by a redirection of flows at the expense of longer transport distances to prevent costly offshore storage.
