u/xenoxero

Can we talk about this song please?!? I don't have any friends with the same music taste as me. I saw them play live earlier this week in Vegas. Actually flew in to see them. It was my first time to see them after chasing them almost 8 years. I cried 3 times-- I'm sorry yes I'm that guy.

But they didn't play my favorite song, Waves Upon Waves. I had checked setlist.fm before going crossing fingers they would play it, but no luck. Michael mentioned during the set about how recording Somni they had a 70+ member orchestra and he was getting used to playing the songs with 10.

The question is for those that saw them on earlier US stops this tour where they played the song... was it a bigger orchestra like at at this performance?? Or did they have a different arrangement/orchestration for the smaller band? Did any video it?!?! Link me please and thank you, I have no life.

My completely unscientific estimate based on a non-random sample is that like 25% of posts in here are about how sad / pissed / frustrated we are at the wave of route and destination reductions in the past year that have screwed over SFO/LAX/Hawaii, and a few airports like ORD/BUR/etc. I fly through SFO/LAX/BUR more than any airports, and I’ve flown on Alaska equipment to several of the airports that had the plug pulled. So I both empathize with others’ frustration and am directly impacted as well.

But my hot take is, isn’t Alaska simply looking at the mountain of trend data they have, and no longer offering flights where they can’t sell enough seats to be profitable? I mean really, what obligation does an airline have to keep a route alive with empty seats just because they had it in the past? Like, i care more about Alaska being a financially solvent airline overall, especially through this tough year for the industry between lower tourism and higher gas prices.

I loved the SFO/BUR route SOOOOOOO much. But one of the reasons was that you could book the cheapest flight for a day, and reliably catch a standby seat on pretty much any other same-day scheduled flight because there was always space. And as a titanium member, I also usually got an upgrade on a STANDBY flight. by definition that means these flights were never really selling out, and probably operating at losses just to get bodies in seats. I regularly paid something like $70 all in or 5k miles to end up in a FC seat on any flight for the day.

They’re moving capacity to markets where people are buying tickets. Isn’t that just basic market correction? If we want routes to stay, people have to actually buy tickets on those routes, and that just wasn’t happening. I got laid off last year, was out of work for 6 months. And that basically equates to like $5k in revenue this year I would have otherwise spent with AS through work/leisure. And I can tell you there are a fuck ton of greater SF/LA area people in the same boat.

So all the people that are pissed about it, shouldn’t you be pissed at like SFO people not flying Alaska as much? Or the political/ecomonic reasons why leisure/international travel and system throughput is down, which Alaska does not control? Do we think there are like evil Alaska executives going “Ooooo, let’s just screw over our customers for no particular reason in one market cuz we like the tacos in San diego”. As dumb as some of the shit is with the website that executives ACTUALLY control and fuck up, I don’t see how they can be blamed for trying to run a lean and profitable company in one of the most notoriously volatile industries.

I know every post for the next year is going to have some version of a comment like “ugh, and yah everything sucks now, fuck San Diego” no matter what logical argument i make cause yah it hurts. But the anger seems kind of irrational to me. Like the only thing to make us happy would be to run the airline into the ground keeping unprofitable routes open.

If someone knowledgeable has a specific teneble vision for how AS could have operated profitably without the cuts, I’d love to hear it. But I haven’t actually seen anyone present a case like that based in the realities of the industry and current trends at the effected airports.