A year ago, Ambitious Airlines launched an Economy Plus class on its

Question Type: To Weaken the conclusion.

Premise 1: Economy Plus service is launched, providing upgraded service at 50% more than the Economy class seats.

Premise 2: The Economy Plus service has failed to generate revenues & is bleeding.

Conclusion: Due to the loss in Economy plus, the airline has decided to can this service.

Analysis: We need to weaken the decision by the airline to end the Economy plus service. This could be done either by providing additional data that shows that, they will be loosing future revenues due to changing consumer preferences or by suggesting that the move can hamper brand equity leading to a possible loss of further revenue, due to loss of existing customers.

Only Answer Choice D, addresses the risk of loosing existing loyal customers, leading to further losses.

Thanks,
GyM

C. The soaring costs of fuel and security in the past year have caused the prices of all airline tickets to rise accordingly.
This option indicates that the prices of air tickets, in general, have increased. Therefore, this information does not specifically refer to the Economy plus seats, but every seat in general. Therefore, this being a general circumstance is not suppose to give the airline any special motivation to cancel just the Economy Plus services. Why not cancel other amenities offered in the flights to adjust the cost increase? The argument in question is about Economy Plus in specific. Incorrect

Can anyone provide more detailed explanation of option D and Option E. As per my understanding both the strategies expect target customer base to improve. In D, the approach expects the loyalty will generate enough number of people to compensate for the costs. In E, the approach expects that the once the user start using premium , the basic services are not very appealing to them. Probably, the option E can be an assumption for Option D to hold true

Personally, I first try to understand exactly what the conclusion is, and how it uses the evidence to arrive at the conclusion. I then look for what could weaken this argument. There are several ways to weaken an argument.

So in this question,

the conclusion is: costs associated with offering Economy Plus service are much higher than its revenue, so the airline will probably decide to end this service soon.
the premise/evidence is: most seats are vacant.

Therefore, what we are looking for in the answers is "what could explain the vacancy in seats, without necessarily negatively impacting costs?"

in E) perceiving something cheaper (the regular economy seats) as less appealing doesn't answer the question we are asking. We want to know, why are seats vacant, but costs aren't necessarily going to go down?

in answer choice D) we see that most of these vacant seats are actually a free bonus for customers who have achieved loyalty status. Well, the very nature of maintaining loyalty status means that you HAVE to spend a certain amount of money to keep that loyalty status, and this extra perk serves as a way to motivate more people to keep their loyalty status, which effectively could translate to higher revenues for the company.

Hope this helps!

I'm not able to understand the elimination of B. Surely, if a competing airline is ending the business class service - some of those users will shift to ambitious airlines? And in that scenario, ambitious airlines may not close down its economy plus service.

We are not negating the premise by this option when we say that "seats are vacant" is sacrosanct. They are vacant today, yes, but not tomorrow.

Thoughts anyone? AndrewN

Hello, Ravi. The logic you are employing above is what I label as being one step removed. Although answers that deal with competitors or similarly sized cities may, on occasion, be correct, the overwhelming majority of the time, they prove incorrect. I like to say that with Verbal questions in general, you want to play it safe, not necessarily seek an airtight answer. In this case, the argument is that Ambitious Airlines will probably discontinue offering an Economy Plus class on its flights. In order to weaken that argument, we want to find a compelling reason for why Economy Plus may continue to be offered on Ambitious Airlines flights. Even if (B) were true, and people in general no longer demanded business class service of any airline, we cannot jump to the conclusion that they would be willing to upgrade from economy class to Economy Plus. The argument could still very well hold. We need to find an answer that more specifically addresses Economy Plus and why it should continue to be offered. How about we consider those besides (B)?

(A) is a good trap answer. However, we cannot generalize that because some passengers, those who fly Economy Plus, report very high levels of satisfaction, the airline should continue to offer Economy Plus seating. The in spite of the low demand framework pretty much seals the fate of (A).

(C) mentions all airline tickets, so we cannot single out Economy Plus tickets and offer any reasonable explanation for why such tickets ought to be offered in the future.

(D) provides just what we are looking for, a financial incentive for Ambitious Airlines to continue to offer Economy Plus seating: to raise the loyalty of this desirable target audience to the company. If the airline finds this particular group of flyers desirable, and Economy Plus seating factors into getting this target group to continue to fly on Ambitious Airlines, then the airline has a reason to continue to offer such seating.

(E) would strengthen the argument if anything, the opposite of what we are looking to do.

I hope that helps. Be careful in CR not to fall into one-step-removed reasoning. By and large, you want to approach the question directly and weaken or strengthen without resorting to your own assumptions.

- Andrew