Read a cancellation spike before you blame the weather

A coastal ferry or an exposed Highland road will of course lose passengers when the forecast turns. The file, however, often shows the cancellation timestamp sitting two days before the first yellow warning, clustered on a single agency channel, or mirrored by an equal number of rebooks onto a later departure the same week.

We ask operators to keep the disruption flag, the refund flag, and the reissue flag as separate columns. When they are collapsed into one ‘cancelled’ mark, a medical no-show, a commercial refund after a complaint, and a weather wipeout become the same story. The commercial meeting then argues about umbrellas instead of about the agency that released a block.

On one coach extract we reconstructed last winter, a Monday spike sat under a storm headline in the operations chat. The timestamps showed most voids at 09:12 and 09:13 — a batch job — against tickets that had never been ticketed for travel that week. Weather had been real that afternoon. It was not what emptied those seats.

A Booking Behaviour Study is the right place for this work if your question is ‘who walks away and when’. A Route Profitability Review will still need the flags, because contribution on a ‘full’ departure that was later voided is not contribution.