Summary
- Just 5% of Allegiant’s flights are on a Tuesday, while Sunday is by far the busiest.
- Its three busiest days have more than six in ten flights.
- While the carrier’s A320s have 4x more services on Sundays than Tuesdays, it rises to 17x for its A319s.
Tuesdays and Wednesdays are generally the best days to snag a cheap flight. This is because demand for air travel changes enormously depending on the day of the week, and these days (and Saturdays) generally have the least demand. It varies by market and leisure/business travel and influences airline fares, capacity, scheduling, aircraft productivity, overall performance, etc. Most airlines address it, but some are much more able to do so than others.
Not all days are equal
Some carriers, such as Allegiant and Breeze in the US and Volotea in Europe, concentrate on operating on particular days much more than others. They revolve around this setup; it is a part of their DNA. They are helped by generally operating older aircraft that do not have to be used as much to reduce the seat-mile cost of aircraft ownership.
Photo: Markus Mainka/Shutterstock
They trade lower aircraft ownership costs with the variable costs of higher fuel consumption and maintenance when they do operate. It will be interesting to see how day-to-day flying varies for Allegiant when its Boeing 737 MAXs arrive, as these will need to be used much more intensively. As discussed later, It already does something similar with its newer A320s than its smaller and older A319s.
How Allegiant’s flights vary per day
Using Cirium data to examine all of Allegiant’s day-to-day flying in October shows that just 5% of its services are on Tuesdays, i.e., just one in 20. Fewer flights on less demanded days mean airlines have fewer seats to sell and don’t have to discount as much. If you’re flexible about when you travel, you can often get much lower fares on off-peak days, especially with (U)LCCs.
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If all days were always served with the same capacity, regardless of demand, airlines would have to discount much more than usual on the quieter days to achieve desired seat load factors, undermining route and overall performance. They would have to rely much more on peak days to make up for it.
Source of data: Cirium. Figure: James Pearson
Nearly a quarter of the carrier’s entire operation is on a Sunday. This one day has more services than Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays combined. Its busiest three days account for a whopping 63% of flights.
Sunday flying has grown a lot
It is insightful to compare how service per day of the week has changed in October 2023 versus the pre-pandemic October 2019. Thursday was Allegiant’s busiest day four years ago, but Sundays have overtaken it.
Source of data: Cirium. Figure: James Pearson
Flights on Sunday have risen by 52%, closely followed by Monday (48%), much more than the carrier’s overall growth (22%). The other main change is that Wednesday flying has fallen by a fifth, meaning its proportion has reduced to just 7% of the total.
How it varies for the A320 and A319
All the above figures refer to Allegiant’s entire operation, with all aircraft combined. Breaking down flying by the A320 and A319 reveals that the busiest to the least busy days are precisely the same: Sunday is number one, and Tuesday is number seven.
Source of data: Cirium. Figure: James Pearson
The peak-to-trough difference changes enormously. While the A320’s busiest day has ‘only’ four times more flights than the quietest, it rises to 17 times for the older and increasingly less used A319. The incoming MAXs will adopt a similar profile to the A320, perhaps slightly less extreme, with less flying on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays.
What do you make of it all? Let us know in the comments.
Sources of information: Cirium, ch-aviation.com