Category Archives for Airlines.
American Airlines believes that investing in product, while necessary to keep up, won’t be a sustainable advantage. All airlines can buy the same products. So the real competitive advantage has to be culture.
The airline does a weekly podcast for employees. This week’s episode is about the airline’s Elevate Training.
When United delayed several flights overnight this week at Chicago O’Hare, passengers took to cots provided by the airport. But airport security rousted them all at 4 a.m. adding true insult to injury.
Austin’s airport is adding 37% more gates next year, and Delta is preparing to make it a focus city complete with SkyClub with outdoor deck.
Focus city status isn’t official for Austin yet, but as of Friday it is for Raleigh-Durham which serves the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, where Delta is already the largest airline (carrying one-third of passengers, with 10% connecting connecting traffic). Delta’s other focus cities are Cincinnati and Boston (of course Cincinnati used to be a hub).
Delta sometimes makes decent business class award space available to Europe, generally when prices are at their lowest for paid tickets. Getting to Asia on Delta can be much harder without paying exorbitant mileage costs (e.g. 200,000-plus miles per person in each direction).
However Delta’s partners, especially their Chinese partners China Southern and China Eastern, offer good availability from West Coast gateways.
After each quarterly earnings call American Airlines senior management holds a ‘State of the Airline’ town hall with employees, where employees can ask questions and get answers.
Some of those questions were about American’s decision to become less restrictive (allow full-sized carry on bags) with their basic economy fares, and the mechanics contract (an issue that never seems to get resolved). However there were several items of broader interest to customers or that offered new insights as well,
Aeromexico which is in some sense a vassal of Delta these days doesn’t own their own frequent flyer program in its entirety. Aimia owns nearly 49%.
And following on Air Canada’s public offer to buy Aeroplan, Aeromexico came in with a lowball offer to buy back their stake in the Club Premier program. It was an offer that was already rejected, but included a kicker straight from the Air Canada playbook.
Singapore Airlines will be flying non-stop from Newark to Singapore — the world’s longest flight — starting October 11.
When the flight was first loaded into the schedule you couldn’t get premium awards. However for some reason they’ve opened the floodgates. Most flights have business class awards available. And many have four or more business class awards available.
It’s difficult to see how United can stand alone, though, with the most draconian restrictions among the largest US airlines. With Delta’s claim that American and United basic economy were driving revenue to them, and with American abandoning their own carry on restriction, it’s just a matter of time before United must react.
On American’s earnings call this morning the airline tried to get ahead of disappointing financial performance both in absolute terms and relative to its largest competitors by announcing new aircraft deferments (reducing, or pushing into the future, capital expenses) and making other changes to their fleet in order to reduce the amount of product (seats) they sell.
On July 3rd I shared that American was poised to relax the most draconian restriction on their lowest-price Basic Economy fares, once again allowing customers on these lowest fares to bring both a personal item and a full sized carry on bag onto the plane. American refused to comment.
However this change has now been announced in this morning’s earnings release, and points to the failure of the business strategy of making your product worse in hopes of generating more revenue.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
