See a great flight for a summertime trip? You can buy it, but it may not be real.
As airlines rebuild schedules amid vaccine-fueled demand, they’ve abandoned historical travel data and are now scheduling in a different way. They are loading “placeholder’’ schedules chock-full of flights into reservation systems six to nine months before departure dates. Then a month or two before flights would actually take off, carriers will load the real schedules.
Flights with lots of reservations will actually happen, and more trips or larger planes may even be added for close-to-departure bookings. Flights with few advance purchases will get canceled, shifting a few customers to other flights.
“In my 20-year career, there’s only one other time I’ve used incoming bookings to plan an airline and that was after the Sept. 11 attacks,’’ says Brian Znotins, American’s vice president of network and schedule planning. “All the airlines have had placeholder schedules out there and then they publish refined schedules as they get closer to it.’’
American, United and Delta all say they will publish their real summer schedules in a few weeks.
