Students traveling for spring break may take comfort in knowing that the industry’s completion factor was about 98 percent between mid-February and mid-April last year.
Scott Kirby, the C.E.O. of United Airlines, thinks completion factor may also be used to shape industry predictions. On an earnings call last month, he chastised analysts for not paying enough attention to the metric, telling them they were “looking at the wrong data.”
“If you want a forward indicator of what’s going to happen with capacity,” Kirby said, “you should watch completion factor.”
