I have a late-afternoon flight out of Tucson to LAX, but the business that I thought I had in Tucson today has fallen through. There’s a morning flight with seats available.
In days of yore, American would have let me go standby on an earlier flight same day with no change fee, which makes business sense, because if they can satisfy their commitment to me to get me where I want to go earlier at essentially no cost other than fuel to carry my weight (assuming that the flight isn’t full), they have an opportunity to sell my seat (at $252 according to a quick check) on the later flight.
Apparently, the suits have decided that they’d rather charge me $75 bucks for the change. Now, it would be nice to get home earlier, but it’s not worth $75 to me, because I can do work here and just catch the later flight. So they just lost the opportunity to sell that seat on the afternoon flight. I guess they think this makes business sense, and maybe they have revenue models that indicates it does, but I’m annoyed.
The business model used by airlines CEO’s to make a small fortune:
Start with a large fortune and wait a year.
Gone are the competent CEO’s – Juan Trippe, Bob Six, the Braniff brothers, et al.
Oh, wait: They were incompetent as well, which is why their airlines are gone.
How can you blame Juan Trippe for Pan Am’s decline? He retired as president at its peak in the late sixties. Unless you’re saying he shouldn’t have retired?
Continental, now United, service has certainly gone downhill. I know why Jeff Smisek made the merger, but he’s still an ass for doing it. Continental was doing just fine without United, and was number 2 in profitability of US Airlines behind Southwest Airlines. Now, I only fly United because its a better option than a mandatory American layover in Dallas or Delta layover in Atlanta. And, thanks mostly to Continental aircraft configuration; United Business First is much better for transoceanic than British Airways.
I stopped flying anyone other than SW Airlines for domestic flights years ago. They are fast and easy to work with, they are friendly, and they make good when they make mistakes (i.e. recompense with vouchers when they have a crazy delay)
The other big carriers seem to think treating their customers like burdens (or cattle) is the way to win business. After the multiple instances of trouble with United that I’ve had, I’ll never fly them again (I used to be a loyal United customer).