FAQ - FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
INTL ROUTE PERFORMANCE REPORT
3) WHAT CARRIERS ARE INCLUDED?
4) A CARRIER/ROUTE SEEMS TO BE MISSING?
7) WHERE CAN I FIND THE CARRIER NAMES FROM THE IATA CODE?
8) IS THIS DATA A QUARTER OR A YEAR?
9) DOES THIS INCLUDE CONNECTIONS?
10) IS THIS DATA ONE-WAY or BOTH WAYS?
12) ONE AIRLINE HAS A HIGHER SCORE WITH WORSE NUMBERS?
13) IS THE SCORE COMPARED TO DOMESTIC ROUTES?
14) WHAT DOES SPONSORED BY MEAN?
16) CAN I REMOVE MY NAME FROM THE SPONSOR LIST?
17) MY NAME WAS SKIPPED ON THE SPONSOR LIST?
18) IS THERE A MINIMUM NUMBER OF DEPARTURES TO APPEAR?
19) IS ANCILLARY REVENUE INCLUDED?
20) HOW ACCURATE IS THIS REPORT?
21) POST-COVID SOME ROUTES WITH TERRIBLE NUMBERS ARE GOOD OR GREAT?
1) I CAN'T SEE THE DATA?
This data is available to INTL TIER and above. If no routes were flown during the period that qualify the report will be blank. This city is shown as an airport with international service history and is on the report calendar, but there may be periods with no data.
2) HOW DO I READ IT?
The columns of data are:
MKT = Market: This is the other airport on the route from the airport featured in the report. For example, if the report was AUS ROUTE RASM PERFORMANCE and the MKT was DFW it would be results for AUS-DFW. The data is bi-directionally averaged, so it includes both AUS-DFW and DFW-AUS in this example.
AL = Airline: The IATA Airline Code of the marketing airline. The marketing and operating airlines have been joined using the Marketing and Operating carrier in the DOT On-Time data reporting. Only carriers reporting DB1B and On-Time data are included.
Score = Score of Route Performance: Performance is shown among five groups compared only against that airline's other routes.
GREAT (Green) is the best 20% of the airline's RASM results (80% to 100%).
GOOD (Blue) is the next 20% group of routes (60-80%).
FINE (Gray) is the middle group which indicates average performance among that airline's routes (40-60%).
WEAK (Orange) indicates the results for the route are below average for that airline (20-40%). It is important to note that a WEAK route may still be profitable depending upon how profitable the airline as a whole was during that quarter.
POOR (Red) is the lowest group and indicates the route is probably at some risk of being cut (0-20%).
N.A. (Black) are airlines with fewer than ten international routes to/from the USA are not graded, NOT AVAILABLE.
1 Yr Ago = Score Compared to One Year Earlier: For example, if this quarter a route had a score of GOOD (the 2nd highest score) and in the same quarter one year earlier it had a score of POOR (the 5th highest score) an icon showing a Green 3 would indicate the route improved (Green) by three positions (POOR to GOOD, 5th to 2nd). If a route declined in its score versus a year earlier the color shown is Red rather than Green. A Black dot indicates no data was available in the pror period or too few flights were operated to compare.
2 Yr Ago = Score Compared to Two Years Earlier: This works the same way as 1 Yr Ago, but if the current year was 2022 Quarter 1, the comparison would be against 2020 Quarter 1...2 years earlier.
1 Yr ASM = Capacity Compared to One Years Earlier: If an airline had ASMs if 10,000 in the current quarter and 20,000 in the quarter one year earlier, this would show -50% indicating the decline by half in capacity from the year earlier period.
RTs = Roundtrips: This is the average number of roundtrips per day over the quarter averaged between directions. 1 daily roundtrip in each direction would show 1.0. A minimum of 10 departures in the market during the quarter is required to appear in this report.
LF = Load Factor: This is the ratio of seats filled with passengers calculated by taking RPMs/ASMs.
LCL Fare = This field was removed in later versions. See NOTE. Local Fare: Local is defined as a passenger whose trip did not include a stop or connections along the way. For AUS-ABQ it is the fare only of passengers traveling AUS-ABQ and ignores passengers who continued on to other flights on either end. This is the average one way fare paid for them from DB1B.
LCL % = Percent of Local Traffic: Local is defined as a passenger whose trip did not include a stop or connections along the way. For AUS-ABQ it is the fare only of passengers traveling AUS-ABQ and ignores passengers who continued on to other flights. This is the ratio of passengers that were local compared to all onboard.
Leg Fare = Average Prorated Fare for All Traffic: This fare incorporates both the local fare and a portion of the fare paid on connecting or through passengers. Using industry standard proration passengers who continued on have their fare split and averaged along with the local passengers to generate a Leg Fare.
3) WHAT CARRIERS ARE INCLUDED?
Any scheduled carrier should appear, but it depends on data availability.
4) A CARRIER/ROUTE SEEMS TO BE MISSING?
In order for a route or a carrier to appear there must be sufficient data available to product a result. This report uses a number of different data sources. If any of them are not available the route will not appear, unfortunately..
5) HOW IS THIS CALCULATED?
A worldwide QSI model was run for each month of the period using schedule data to split each airline's traffic among the possible routings. That split is then applied to the estimated traffic by airline used in INTL AIRPORT OVERVIEW REPORT and adjusted with the data used in the INTL STATION LOAD FACTORS REPORT. Proration is accomplished via industry standard root of the miles method.
6) IS THIS RASM BASED?
A new method was needed for this report was needed compared to domestic ROUTE RASM REPORT because of widely varying seat density on aircraft. As a result the scoring is based upon a blend of RASM (Revenue divided by available seat miles) and revenue divided by aircraft weight metrics. This means an a typical premium/coach configuration is treated with a similar cost profile to an all premium configuration.
7) WHERE CAN I FIND THE CARRIER NAMES FROM THE IATA CODE?
The Flashback Post FAQ has a number of airline codes for several periods HERE.
8) IS THIS DATA A QUARTER OR A YEAR?
It is a single quarter. Because profit performance can be very seasonal I only compare to the same quarter in prior years as well.
9) DOES THIS INCLUDE CONNECTIONS?
Yes, this report prorates fares across connections.
10) IS THIS DATA ONE-WAY or BOTH WAYS?
Both directions are added together and averaged.
12) ONE AIRLINE HAS A HIGHER SCORE WITH WORSE NUMBERS?
The scores are specific to that airline. If one airline generates great revenue numbers system-wide and another generates much lower revenue numbers relative to capacity the same RASM could generate vastly different Scores. At an LCC a route with a $150 Legfare and 95% LF may be GREAT, but at a legacy carrier with much higher fares on average across their network those same numbers may only generate a POOR result.
13) IS THE SCORE COMPARED TO DOMESTIC ROUTES?
International routes are only compared against international routes. The cost profile is wildly different from domestic to international. Generally domestic routes would be disadvantaged on a revenue based metric. For that reason international is only compared against international.
14) WHAT IS SPONSORED BY?
As a way of saying Thanks, INTL/BUSINESS Tier members are thanked with a Sponsored By shout-out on this report.
15) CAN I SPONSOR A POST?
All MOST/BUSINESS Tier members will rotate into a sponsor position. If you want to do more message me!
16) CAN I REMOVE MY NAME FROM THE SPONSOR LIST?
The easiest way to do that is to change your DISPLAY NAME in your Patreon settings to a name that you are comfortable with. Patreon feeds that list directly and there is no way to remove members, but you can change your DISPLAY NAME to any non-offensive name you would like!
17) MY NAME WAS SKIPPED ON THE SPONSOR LIST?
When a post is cancelled or recreated it can skip to the next name on the MOST/BUSINESS Tier list. I apologize if your name was skipped, but rest assured it will come back up again before long.
18) IS THERE A MINIMUM NUMBER OF DEPARTURES TO APPEAR?
Ten operations or more in both combined directions must have occurred during the period to be included.
19) IS ANCILLARY REVENUE INCLUDED?
On this report it is not, but there is a good reason for that. Since the airline's route RASM is only compared to its own other routes there is no benefit to including Ancillary Revenue. Ancillary is not available by route, so it would need to be allocated across the network. Because of that it would not change the grading of the routes if it were added, so there is no point to including it. The only impact of not including it is that the shown average fares are low for airlines like Spirit, although accurate since ancillaries are not part of the fare.
20) HOW ACCURATE IS THIS REPORT?
This report is definitely less accurate than domestic ROUTE RASM REPORT. While very little is estimated in the creation of that report, a great deal is estimated in this report. Generally speaking, domestic U.S. carriers are more accurate in this report because fare data by region is available at the aggregate level in DOT Form 41 which is used to adjust screen scraped and estimated fares. Because that data is not available for foreign flags the foreign flag fares are essentially an amalgam of U.S. carrier fares adjusted with screen scraping differentials, however, since grading is against the same carrier's flights this is not as big a problem as it would seem for comparing route results of a single carrier. There are very few sources for route profitability data in this format, however, so there is little to compare these results to.
21) POST-COVID SOME ROUTES WITH TERRIBLE NUMBERS ARE GOOD OR GREAT?
Keep in mind that the grading is relative to the carrier's other international routes only in and out of the USA. A minimum of 10 routes is requried for scoring, which is only 5 roundtrip routes. If all 5 are bad then there is only the best of a group of bad routes. During COVID international routes had very low load factors and revenue. Even a large airline may have achieved a load factor no better than 30% on any of their U.S. routes, so it is all relative. To quote a somewhat politically incorrect folk metaphor, "in the land of the blind the one-eyed person is king".
22) WHY WAS LCL FARE REMOVED?
This field was removed for two main reasons, much like the Airport Overview Report. User feedback was that fares were too high relative to fares on other domestic reports creating the impression that international was much more profitable than domestic which was exaggerated relative to reality because of calculation differences. Domestic data taken from DOT DB1B includes zero fare frequent flier redemption tickets which lower overall fares. Thus, comparison to international fares vs domestic fares gathered mostly from screen scraping created inconsistencies. Additionally, screen scraping an exact fare requires a lot more successful scraping than a relative fare level. Increasing difficulty successfully screen scraping fares also lead to the change. For now I have left the LEG FARE field which includes an amalgamation of local fares and prorated connect fares which tends to smooth out aberrant fares in a single O&D combination much more effectively.