American Airlines will begin testing free wifi next week, starting on 3 routes:

• Charlotte – Jacksonville
  
• Charlotte – Raleigh
  
• Chicago – Miami

The airline says the test will determine

• Take rates (how much customers use it when it’s free)
  
• Bandwidth (whether their wifi system can handle the increased use)
  
• “The impact to customer satisfaction via NPS scores.”

As long as American is buying enough bandwidth from ViaSat and Intelsat, they should be able to handle it. There’s no question that usage goes up when it’s free. It would even go up if it were less expensive. Today, American Airlines charges substantially more than other U.S. airlines for inflight wifi.

I do think, though, that the need to determine how much their net promoter score increases with free wifi misses the point a bit.

It’s easy to see how much revenue they would lose from free wifi. They know what the revenue stream from selling wifi looks like. The CFO will choke hard over this one.

But it’s hard to see how much ticket revenue they are losing to other airlines because of wifi. When the ticket price is the same, American Airlines is the more expensive trip option than Delta and JetBlue and soon United because they charge $15 – $30 per flight for wifi versus free. American could be losing more ticket revenue than they’re generating in wifi revenue, and not even know it.

They want to see free wifi move the needle on net promoter score to see that giving up the paid wifi income is worthwhile. But wifi alone might not move the needle. They still need to do it!

• American still lacks seat back entertainment screens
  
• And offers very little buy on board, and is cheap on snacks
  
• And service is generally less friendly than on Delta, too.

If offering free wifi doesn’t move the needle a lot on net promoter score, does that mean you shouldn’t do it? Or that you need to lean harder into free wifi and other changes to the product? Put another way, do you give up on a competitive offering that appeals to customers?

In 2017, America Airlines promised free messaging at its Media and Investor Day. Then they never implemented (and even asked like they’d never heard of such an idea when I asked about it). The senior executive who announced it hadn’t fully cleared it, and the CFO at the time killed it as too expensive. They do not even offer free messaging today, years after the industry moved to that as a standard. The mental model naturally leads them to wonder whether fully free wifi would gain enough in NPS score to be worth it?

American’s net promoter score significantly lags that of primary competitors Delta and United. They aren’t going to dig out from their deficit with free wifi alone. There’s a plan for American Airlines that turns things around but taking a wait and see attitude and insisting on proof in the spreadsheets isn’t what gets them there.

At a recent investor conference, United’s CFO spoke about a $50 million increase in food investment even though it isn’t going to directly show up trackable in ticket purchases – but it’s necessary to become the preferred airline for customers and earn a revenue premium. That’s what American is competing against.

In 2012 I wrote that wifi would eventually be free, once there was enough bandwidth on board so that one customer’s use didn’t trade off with another’s. That’s largely happened. JetBlue and Delta offer free wifi. United is moving to Starlink (enough bandwidth) which will be free. And it looks like American is being pushed there – dragged kicking and screaming, perhaps, but they have to get there.