Travel Insider October 8, 2006
The airline of the future: Could it be Continental?
The carrier may seem like nothing special, but it has the right stuff to stay in the black and at the head of the pack.
CONTINENTAL is the Clark Kent of airlines.
Like Superman's alter-ego, it's mild-mannered, even dull. It looks like the other button-down guys.
Yet it pops up seemingly everywhere. And when awards are issued, it darts into a phone booth, dons a cape and zooms into the clouds.
Continental runs the best business class of any U.S. airline on foreign routes and the best premium service on domestic routes, according to a readers survey of more than 1,800 business travelers in this month's Condé Nast Traveler magazine.
Earlier this year, Continental nosed out Delta for best network carrier in an annual poll of 9,334 North American fliers by J.D. Power & Associates, a marketing company in Westlake Village.
On the other hand, it ranked only eighth out of 17 U.S. carriers in this year's Airline Quality Rating, a study by researchers at Wichita State University in Kansas and the University of Nebraska that relies mostly on federal statistics on customer complaints, on-time flights and other factors.
Why should you care?
Because the low-key, Houston-based company may one day shape the way most people fly: pampered in business and first class, with a few key perks in economy. And lots of routes to chose from.
"The real future is with carriers like Continental," said aviation analyst Mike Boyd, who views it as the best of the comprehensive network airlines, which include American, Delta, Northwest and United.
With tentacles that stretch from booming mid-sized U.S. cities to Beijing, these behemoths and their regional partners go where the growth is. That's not on coast-to-coast routes, where low-cost carriers pile on planes and drive down fares, said Boyd, president of the Boyd Group in Evergreen, Colo.
Continental can trace its current success to 1994, when Gordon Bethune rode to the rescue of a company that had stumbled into Chapter 11 bankruptcy twice in one decade.
"Gordon Bethune left a heck of a legacy," Boyd said. "And the current management picked up the ball and ran with it."
In recent years, Continental has avoided bankruptcy and labor strife, the twin plagues of its peers. Like most of them, it's making money again.
Explaining the airline's high rank in surveys, Linda Hirneise, executive director of the travel practice at J.D. Power & Associates, said, "It's not one thing done right. It's many things done right consistently."
Some of those things:
Continental flies nearly everywhere: It's only the fourth largest U.S. airline, and its hubs, well east of the Rockies, aren't glamorous: Houston, Cleveland and Newark, N.J. By passengers flown, it recently ranked seventh at LAX. (United was No. 1.)
But Continental flies to more international destinations than any other U.S. airline, 138 in all, with routes to Asia, Europe, Latin America and elsewhere.
Its customers have access to hundreds more flights through the SkyTeam global airline alliance, which Tim Winship, editor and publisher of the online newsletter FrequentFlier.com, judges "the most robust of the alliances" in U.S.-based carriers, which also include Delta and Northwest.
The airline of the future: Could it be Continental?
The carrier may seem like nothing special, but it has the right stuff to stay in the black and at the head of the pack.
CONTINENTAL is the Clark Kent of airlines.
Like Superman's alter-ego, it's mild-mannered, even dull. It looks like the other button-down guys.
Yet it pops up seemingly everywhere. And when awards are issued, it darts into a phone booth, dons a cape and zooms into the clouds.
Continental runs the best business class of any U.S. airline on foreign routes and the best premium service on domestic routes, according to a readers survey of more than 1,800 business travelers in this month's Condé Nast Traveler magazine.
Earlier this year, Continental nosed out Delta for best network carrier in an annual poll of 9,334 North American fliers by J.D. Power & Associates, a marketing company in Westlake Village.
On the other hand, it ranked only eighth out of 17 U.S. carriers in this year's Airline Quality Rating, a study by researchers at Wichita State University in Kansas and the University of Nebraska that relies mostly on federal statistics on customer complaints, on-time flights and other factors.
Why should you care?
Because the low-key, Houston-based company may one day shape the way most people fly: pampered in business and first class, with a few key perks in economy. And lots of routes to chose from.
"The real future is with carriers like Continental," said aviation analyst Mike Boyd, who views it as the best of the comprehensive network airlines, which include American, Delta, Northwest and United.
With tentacles that stretch from booming mid-sized U.S. cities to Beijing, these behemoths and their regional partners go where the growth is. That's not on coast-to-coast routes, where low-cost carriers pile on planes and drive down fares, said Boyd, president of the Boyd Group in Evergreen, Colo.
Continental can trace its current success to 1994, when Gordon Bethune rode to the rescue of a company that had stumbled into Chapter 11 bankruptcy twice in one decade.
"Gordon Bethune left a heck of a legacy," Boyd said. "And the current management picked up the ball and ran with it."
In recent years, Continental has avoided bankruptcy and labor strife, the twin plagues of its peers. Like most of them, it's making money again.
Explaining the airline's high rank in surveys, Linda Hirneise, executive director of the travel practice at J.D. Power & Associates, said, "It's not one thing done right. It's many things done right consistently."
Some of those things:
Continental flies nearly everywhere: It's only the fourth largest U.S. airline, and its hubs, well east of the Rockies, aren't glamorous: Houston, Cleveland and Newark, N.J. By passengers flown, it recently ranked seventh at LAX. (United was No. 1.)
But Continental flies to more international destinations than any other U.S. airline, 138 in all, with routes to Asia, Europe, Latin America and elsewhere.
Its customers have access to hundreds more flights through the SkyTeam global airline alliance, which Tim Winship, editor and publisher of the online newsletter FrequentFlier.com, judges "the most robust of the alliances" in U.S.-based carriers, which also include Delta and Northwest.
