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The dates are set. It was announced yesterday in a press release by MAS. As predicted, the fair will begin on 31st January 2007. It will go on for a single week, through to 6th February 2007. That’s seven days for holiday makers to plan their holidays and grab the 5,000,000 MAS tickets on offer during the fair period.

On a different note, MAS unveiled an all new (and impressively sophisticated) pricing system. Under the new system, fare prices will be adjusted weekly, and later on daily, based on benchmarks of the lowest prices against that of other full service airlines. This new system doubles the fare options available to customers from its current eight to sixteen for more than 100 routes worldwide. There’ll be 10 fare buckets for the economy class, 3 each for business, three more for first class.

Basically, it is an extended tiered system. With more buckets/tiers, the ticket price increment between tiers becomes more gradual. There are several reasons MAS is introducing this new tiered system.

The first is to lessen the impact of high volume sales of the lower priced tickets as opposed to the higher tiered fares. It is only natural that lower tiered tickets which are significantly cheaper would sell. However, once those are sold and the fares go into the next tier, they become less popular and fewer tickets are sold due to the sudden increase in price.

Secondly, it is difficult to remain competitive with cheaper airlines while remaining profitable. With the additional tiers, MAS would be able to offer some tickets which are competitively priced. This would immediately attract consumer attention. The point of the whole exercise is to remain competitive and gain visibility.

Available seats may or may not be distributed evenly across the different buckets within each class. I am wont to believe that the latter is true. Following the law of averages, MAS doesn’t stand to make more or less if all the seats are sold unless they tweak the prices to their advantage. Averaging the fares for all seats within a class should reveal that the average fare is slightly higher (speculation but there’s no logical reason for it to be otherwise). With a larger number of buckets, they can distribute the tickets in such a way to maximise their profits through sales volume and higher ticket prices. If they play it right, they’ll no doubt make a bigger profit from sales.

How will this affect the consumer? Well, straight up, there will be tickets going for dirt cheap (relatively speaking). However, there’ll be fewer of them. Ticket prices on average will be slightly more expensive but not noticeably so. A few dollars here and there eventually add up when you’re moving millions of tickets.

The low and high tiers might be cheaper while the mid range tiers slightly more expensive. In other words, if you’re lucky enough to be the first, you’ll get a good bargain but if you’re slow, you’ll wind up paying slightly more. This is the same model that are employed by low cost airlines such as Air Asia.

Needless to say, this new pricing scheme will be applied to the tickets being offered during MATF. Will it affect the ticket prices? Undoubtedly. Will it affect ticket sales? That remains to be seen. Stay tuned for more details.