In another thread our friend Cosmo chastised me for ranting about UA's poor management and assured me that UA would be profitable as loads increase this summer.
Well, summer seems to have arrived early!
In my rebuttal, I asked how UA would be able to operate with even higher load factors and said that "valuable customers" would be disserviced to an unbearable degree because there is no way to protect them when flights are cancelled.
An acquintance of mine was travelling on UA and received notice of the flight cancellation 1 and 1/2 hours before departure. That "valuable customer" was already at the airport because a passenger must check in two hours before a flight that lasts less time then that. UA rebooked passengers on a flight more than 5 hours later! That means this "valuable customer" will be waiting in the airport for seven hours for a flight scheduled for less than two!
This is happening more and more frequently on more and more airlines.
And yet UA's management is on record as saying they have put "too much capacity into the domestic market"! Let's push loads even higher!
People who can afford alternatives to this treatment most certainly will pursue them. Thanks to poor management in the US airline industry we will see a very robust market for VLJs in the future. And as UA and other airlines lost their revenue first class passengers to fractionals, so they will lose their full Y passengers to new air taxi services flying VLJs. The only passengers left will be those connecting to long-haul international flights and leisure travellers who will skip from airline to airline based on the lowest price.
Is ANYONE paying attention? Or are they simply emulating Silas Marner, counting their millions in the sanctum of their executive palaces?
Well, summer seems to have arrived early!
In my rebuttal, I asked how UA would be able to operate with even higher load factors and said that "valuable customers" would be disserviced to an unbearable degree because there is no way to protect them when flights are cancelled.
An acquintance of mine was travelling on UA and received notice of the flight cancellation 1 and 1/2 hours before departure. That "valuable customer" was already at the airport because a passenger must check in two hours before a flight that lasts less time then that. UA rebooked passengers on a flight more than 5 hours later! That means this "valuable customer" will be waiting in the airport for seven hours for a flight scheduled for less than two!
This is happening more and more frequently on more and more airlines.
And yet UA's management is on record as saying they have put "too much capacity into the domestic market"! Let's push loads even higher!
People who can afford alternatives to this treatment most certainly will pursue them. Thanks to poor management in the US airline industry we will see a very robust market for VLJs in the future. And as UA and other airlines lost their revenue first class passengers to fractionals, so they will lose their full Y passengers to new air taxi services flying VLJs. The only passengers left will be those connecting to long-haul international flights and leisure travellers who will skip from airline to airline based on the lowest price.
Is ANYONE paying attention? Or are they simply emulating Silas Marner, counting their millions in the sanctum of their executive palaces?