Why a Tuesday Aberdeen departure is not a quieter Friday

Friday evening seats on the Inverness corridor tend to sell to people who already know they are travelling: visiting family, a booked hotel, a lift arranged at the other end. The booking date sits close to the departure date, but the intent is firm. Cancellations, when they come, cluster after a workplace message on Thursday afternoon.

Tuesday early services out of Aberdeen behave differently. A larger share is booked many weeks out by people stitching together hospital, college, and shift patterns. Another share appears in the last forty-eight hours as stand-by travel when a car is in the garage. Load can look respectable in a weekly average and still hide a first coach that is full of concession returns and a second coach that should never have been diagrammed.

When we read a file, we split by booked-day-of-week as well as by travel-day-of-week. The two calendars disagree more often on midweek north-east departures than on leisure Fridays. If your roster assumes Tuesday is simply ‘Friday minus twenty percent’, the extract will usually show a different shape: fewer pairs, more singles, more open returns used as one-ways.

None of this is an argument for cutting Tuesday. It is an argument for pricing and vehicle size that match the people who actually sit down. A Route Profitability Review on this kind of corridor spends as much time on party size and concession mix as it does on the headline load factor.