Data on Delta Tell A Troubling Tale (USA Today 11/10/06)

That article made MY Day............so those big bad folks "Love to Fly and It Shows" :lol: My, my, my and they have the nerve to throw attitude. :up: Big question is, are they capable of a "MELTDOWN" or is there one in progress?
 
Joe makes some very good points. Calling the executives "Fools" is a bit harsh and sounds like his grapes are a little sour, but his assessment of the market is right on.

The whole financial morass that legacy carriers find themselves in is a result of losing market share and thus pricing power. Now why did they lose market share? Somebody built a better mousetrap that caught the same number of mice at a lower cost per mouse, i.e SWA and others.

The Legacy Carriers REFUSE to get off the crack cocaine of yield management based pricing and offer an inherently fairer and more customer friendly way to fly, whether it be business or pleasure.

The Legacy Carriers are reaping the seeds they have sown both with their core customers and front line employees.

President Bush took all kinds of flak when he was asked about "Helping" the Big Three Automakers and he replied, "The Big Three need to make cars the American public want to buy". Harsh but accurate words and I think they apply here. Provide a product that people want to buy.

Sounds great Piney, but usually providing that product usually is placed on the employees "financial back" rather then priceing it such because you can't raise the fare knowing there is always another WAL-MART out there to cut the price basically because of their low upstart costs. I believe in giving the customer a product they deseve and want but sometimes that customer has to pay for it. To many times the customer wants something for nothing!! I sometime ago had a lady ask me "Why do I have to pay 10 bucks for my "inflight" meal?" My response was, and I was nice..."Since you paid $39 bucks for your ticket!! Basically, you get what you pay for. If the airlines designed a new mousetrap, the customer would want it for free and there would be someone out there giving it free but remember, it's not free...someone is paying for it and I bet it's the employees through givebacks!!
 
Flufdriver,

SWA has what? 9% of the market. That means that 91% of the flying public chooses someone else.

Though that is mostly true. You also have to be able to deliver the public where they want to go before they can even consider choosing you.
 
So, did Brancatelli actually state, "Trust me when I tell you that nothing like a US/DL merger will EVER happen."??

That's pretty bold and definitive statement. But I agree that the upcoming mergers are not so much the structured consolidation and dominance of the legacy carriers, but maybe their final transformation or dissolving.
 
I'm certainly not a Delta fan, nor I have any animosity toward them other than the typical competitive feeling one gets when working for another carrier. (Oddly enough, though, I'm not a USAirways fan, either.)

But we've all seen similar articles written in past years about USAirways and that "maybe USAirways is so awful that it doesn't deserve to exist." Well, one way or another, USAirways survived such venom and now gets to rub those writers' noses in the s*** they wrote.

Delta just may pull it off, too, and as a standalone carrier. Stranger things have happened.