Revenue Per Available Seat Mile - RASM
Categories: Metrics
Airplanes. How well are they...charging? Optimizing sales?
The notion is that a mile of airplane travel is a commodity. All miles are the same, whether you're flying Detroit to Hawaii, or from Dubai to Seattle, or from Phoenix to Dallas. And yes, the stat applies to Greyhound and to B&O Railroad, or the equivalent passenger train with lots o' passenger seats and no cargo to be able to monkey with the attributable stats.
So if, in a year, SouthWest had routes which, altogether, flew 10 million miles, and the average plane had 100 seats available, then they will have flown 1 billion miles. And if they had $10 billion in revenues, then the RPASM figure is $10 billion divided by 10 billion seat miles, or $1 a seat mile.
Good? Bad? All relative...and they'll look at what the other plane travel companies did to figure out the answer.
