I just made a pretty decent mistake, so I thought I’d share it with you all so you don’t do the same thing!
A strategy of mine was no longer working, so I decided I would pursure a new strategy. This involved changing the plane types of about half the fleet. All my planes are leased, so I figured this would be relatively simple… Terminate the lease of the unwanted 737-900’s and sign a lease for the lovely new A330! Given I could get an A330 for a little over the deposit of two 737’s all would be good.
I jumped into the schedule screen of the unwanted routes, and clicked delete - so far so good.
Next I went to the flight screen, clicked on all the scheduled flights and hit the delete button - Mistake no.1, I lost a considerable amount of money in cancelation fees.
Thinking I was too late now to back track I figured oh well good thing if terminate the lease and get the A330… Unfortunately when you terminate a lease it doesn’t refund the money until the end of the week!
So what did I learn (and thought you could too)?
[list=1][]Cancel the flight schedule, but DO NOT CANCEL SCHEDULED FLIGHTS!!!! It’s costly.[]If your going to terminate a lease, make sure you line the final flights to be just before the lease renewal date is.[*]Don’t expect instant $$ out of terminating a lease.[/list]No doubt you can all get some LOL’s out of this
The penalty for cancelling a flight and the fact that you lease a plane per week (and get your money back at the end of that week minus the last lease) are both topics that have been discussed here in the past weeks.
Cancelling flights (in the community support forum)
Plus there’s another small problem with changing one leased aircraft for another is that either you are left with redundant pilots when the canceled lease runs out, or you have to wait for the lease to run out before you can assign the pilots to the newly leased aircraft.