PA18 -
It is ashame to see someone like B6 being able to waltz in and pull market share is such an important airport.
MMY,
My point exactly. Thank you.
My frequent rants here about no US non-stops from the northeast to Florida are framed around one thing -- the Customer.
And US's resistance to taking them from where they live (where it's cold in the winter) to where they want to go (where it's warm in the winter)
without making them go through someplace they
don't want to go, thereby chasing them away to other airlines.
The other airlines seem to have no problem accomodating this most basic desire of the Customer. When any of my acquaintances fly from the snow to the sun, they do so on Southwest out of MHT, or JetBlue, Delta, or American out of BOS. Non-stop.
Those airlines realize that most people leaving the northeast in winter are headed to Florida or other warmer climes, and they offer them the means of getting there. (JetBlue can't add non-stops from BOS to Florida fast enough.)
As you so eloquently put it, it is indeed a shame to see the likes of a JetBlue "waltz in" and grab all that business from an airline who has had a presence in BOS forever (and who used to send full flights non-stop from BOS to PBI, FLL, TPA, and RSW -- the last being the Winter Headquarters of Red Sox Nation).
A guy walks into a Dunkin' Donuts and asks for a cup of black coffee. The counter person says, "Oh, we'll sell you a cup of coffee all right; but you
have to have cream in it."
So the guy goes next door to McDonald's, and they say, "Sure, we'll sell you a cup of black coffee. Coming right up!"
(And in an attempt to entice the customer to buy the coffee the way
they want to sell it to him, Dunkin' Donuts prices it at
less than it costs to actually produce.)
Sure, US Airways will sell you a ticket from Boston to Orlando. However...
The subject of this thread is PHL airport congestion. And I agree with our fellow poster who suggested that the congestion unnecessarily inconveniences the very valuable customer base that
lives in the PHL metro area.
I mean, is it
really necessary to send a narrow-body aircraft from BOS to PHL
every hour -- especially when more than half the customers on the flight are
not going to PHL? I would think that the business flyers who are traveling between those two cities could be accomodated with a half-dozen flights a day, scheduled around prime business hours, with maybe a "catch-all" flight later in the evening.
Again, I realize that the merger was only consummated in September. Come next winter, however, if US once again insists on sending most of its customers to an airport that is
not their final destination, and exposing them to all the pitfalls that lie therein (misconnects, lost baggage, oversold flights out of the hub, etc.) I, for one, will be very discouraged.