USA Today reported yesterday here that a larger proportion of fliers are sleeping at home on Saturday Nights than three years ago.
The Saturday Night Stayover is a dated remnant from the past that many airlines still use. Now, first, the requirement of a Saturday night stayover only applies to roundtrip fares. What is means is that if you do not stay over, a whole slew of fares which require it are now no longer applicable.
Thus, Person A travelling Wednesday to Friday will pay $100 to fly on Flight 1 on Wednesday. Person B isn’t staying over, so he isn’t eligible for the $100 fare. There are $100 seats available, but he must pay $400.
This does not usually target leisure travellers. Most leisure travellers leave on Friday and return on Sunday, even if there is a week in between. This targets the airline’s most loyal customers…the business traveller. He or she is most likely to not stay the weekend.
Low cost carriers such as Southwest employ a much more liberal one-way fare platform, effectively liberalizing the fare market by telling people their travel is geared to what price seats are available at when they book, not how long before they are coming back. And other carriers who compete with them on routes often will file one-way fares to compete.
In 2005, Delta introduced Simplifares, originally tested at its Cincinnati hub. Simplifares included the end of the Saturday night stay rule, a $499 cap on one-way coach fares and a $599 cap on one-way first-class fares, and just four levels of advance purchase: 3, 7, 14, and 21 day. Simplifares was limited to the continental United States and didn’t include the Delta Shuttle(the fares on that were adjusted when Jetblue began service on those routes.). Finally, those rates still required roundtrip travel with a minimum overnight stayover.
Those caps have been increased due to rising fuel costs to $704 for a one-way coach ticket, and $804 for a first-class ticket. Despite these rises, an analysis by Sabre indicates 44% of domestic airline tickets required a Saturday night stayover, versus 51% three years ago. Either way, the Saturday night stayover is slowly creeping back into fares it had previously left.
Either way, Simplifares or not, with rising hotel costs and incidentals, more travellers are foregoing the Saturday night stay, despite the savings, in order to save money overall, while spending more on their airline tickets.