Tag Archives for project oasis.
American Airlines is about to take the last standard domestic planes that still have seat back video screens, and rip those out.
One of the biggest mistakes American Airlines has made in the past several years is its new domestic product. They crammed more seats into planes, removed seat back entertainment screens, and now passengers board thinking they’re on old aircraft.
Ex-CEO Doug Parker greenlit the Torquemada-style seating program and didn’t even try his airline’s product until it was flying for about six months. It turns out they didn’t even build a mockup of it first to see how it would work for passengers and employees. New CEO Robert Isom has previously described needing to make the best of it, since they’re stuck it with it.
American Airlines, and in particular current Tempe management, is known in the industry for being ‘penny wise and pound foolish.’
They spend lavishly on aircraft, investing in foreign airlines, and a new corporate headquarters (now supported with $10 billion in taxpayer cash over the last 18 months) while taking short cuts on employee pay and customer experience. And it winds up costing them more money in the long run.
American’s new domestic coach product is worse than Delta’s. It’s worse than JetBlue’s. It’s worse than Southwest’s. The customer experience just wasn’t a priority. The airline didn’t bother building a cabin mockup before declaring this their standard product and rolling it out. Airline CEO Doug Parker didn’t even try it himself before the decision was made – or even until it was flying for six months.
It has hard seats and less space per passenger, and the airline even took out TVs from the seats.
American Airlines failed to build a mockup of its new domestic interior, and that’s how obvious mistakes were made. In CEO Doug Parker’s telling, they cared about squeezing seats onto the plane not what it was like to sit in those seats or for employees to work the new configuration.
That’s changing for upcoming retrofits and new products like the Airbus A321XLR and Boeing 787-9 new interior.
While other airlines minimize their spending to conserve cash during the pandemic, American has been accelerating their capital spending to convert planes more quickly to this new standard. This is the wrong product at the wrong time: exactly the moment where there are fewer customers (so planes with more seats are less needed) and customers value space between them most (so reducing space between customers makes no sense).
American is nearly done. They have now sent 200 Boeing 737-800s in for densification. That’s two-thirds of the 737-800 fleet. But it’s far more of the active fleet.
American continues to spend money they do not have in order to squeeze more seats onto planes that they cannot sell. American is densifying aircraft to prepare for a future in which passengers demand the ability to buy more space for themselves.
That’s odd enough. Once they complete this retrofit, they go do it again to fix the flawed first class they continue to install.
American isn’t just cramming seats closer together, so that customers will have an even worse experience when they return to the skies, they’re doing it now to planes that have seat back video – even though the airline had promised these planes would be done last.
American Airlines has cut its international schedule by 75% and its domestic schedule by 30%. Load factors are dropping. People aren’t buying tickets. The one thing American Airlines has too much of is seating capacity. And the one thing American Airlines has too little of to make it through this crisis is money. That’s why they’re running to the government for assistance.
And yet they’re continuing their ‘Oasis retrofit’ program where they replace the interiors of domestic aircraft to add seats to planes, making them less comfortable for passengers.
American Airlines has a new internal video for employees explaining that cramming more seats onto planes is good for business and good for customers too. Vasu Raja, the airline’s Senior Vice President of Network Strategy, says that densifying “both for our customers, for our team, and for the future of american airlines that’s an amazing thing.”
There are four basic arguments American makes. I don’t think they hold up well to scrutiny.
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 »
