February 2011 Archives

Ice on the apron proves just a little tricky for this Scandinavian Airlines Boeing 737, captured sliding around at Norway's Bodø Airport. Full video from VGTV can be seen here. 

Emirates won the popular vote at Loyalty 2011 in Fort Worth, Texas last night for its Skywards Miles Accelerator initiative. The Middle East giant was one of the three winners recognised by the awards judging panel, alongside SAS and Intercontinental Hotels Group.

(left to right: Graham Dunn, managing editor Airline Business, Amy Ceriani-Nelson, director priority club rewards InterContinental Hotels, Thomas Bruhn, manager CRM strategies EuroBonus SAS, Kashmira Motiwalla, manager product development & marketing Emirates, Ravindra Bhagwanani, managing director, Global Flight)

With its Miles Accelerator initiative Emirates moved away from the traditional pattern of awarding bonus miles over a given time period to allocate bonus miles on specific flights and cabins only, closely aligned to yield management. More on it here.

SAS was recognised for its Time to Forecast promotion, engaging members to predict their own flight activity with the SAS Group. More on it here.

Intercontinental Hotels won the non-air category for a highly publicised campaign aiming at members of a competitor's programme, which had previously raised many award levels and devaluated the programme value for its members as result. More on it here.

Loyalty 2011 is being held in Fort Worth as home carrier American Airlines this year celebrates the 30th anniversary of its Aadvantage scheme - the first airline frequent flyer programme.

Check out the key issues and the loyalty debate so far via Twitter #loyalty11.

More here about Loyalty 2011, organised by Airline Business and Globalflight

In fact you won't be able to nick these Royal Wedding 'souvenirs' from the seat-pocket of any flight to the UK, but committed republicans, revolutionaries and traitors to the crown can order theirs here.

Quite why it's taken five years of legal wrangling to work this out is beyond me, but the European Court of Justice has ruled that people aren't stupid enough to mistake the Chilean carrier LAN for Spain's Air Nostrum.

Perhaps LAN felt its lawyers were being underused when it sent them out to pursue Air Nostrum for having the audacity to register the trademark 'Lineas Aereas del Mediterraneo LAM' which, LAN claimed, would create "a likelihood of confusion" on the part of the average Spanish consumer.

LAN's lack of faith in the aforementioned consumers' intellect hasn't swayed the European court, which has released nine pages of detailed explanation about why 'LAN' and 'Lineas Aereas del Mediterraneo LAM' aren't similar at all, dismissed LAN's claim and, into the bargain, told it to cough up the costs.

Alaska Air Group chief executive William Ayer believes his company would be found "not guilty" in the fee court of Southwest Airlines.

Southwest followed its "Bags Fly Free" campaign with a roll-out of a series of commercials featuring "Fee Court" scenarios where other airlines are taken to task for charging outrageous change fees.

During a speech at FAA's annual forecast conference, Ayer called the new ads clever, and joked Alaska would not render a guilty verdict. He highlighted Alaska's pledge of of a $20 dollar discount code on a future flight if bags fail to arrive at baggage claim within 20 minutes. Alaska charges $20 each for three checked bags except for military personnel, first class travellers, frequent flyers, flights within the state of Alaska and its flights to Guadalajara and Mexico City.

Ayer says Alaska recognizes there are limits to product unbundling, and among other criteria for deciding how to unbundle the carrier "must look everyone in the eye while we're explaining it". 

Here's just one of Southwest's Fee Court commercials.

If you haven't seen Airbus' somewhat patronising put-down of Boeing's bid for public support over the World Trade Organisation spat, it's worth a look.

You could probably have a field day examining the psychological power dynamics at work. Or reflecting on whether the campaign could easily have been reversed with little change to the basic points. Or wishing you could bang their heads together.

US carriers are attempting to share some love, and more importantly cash, on this St. Valentines Day.

United-Continental is handing $224 million in profit sharing today while Delta is passing out $331 million.

Soutwest also gave its employees a $150 bonus just ahead of the holiday today.

Delta's $331 million payout is the largest in the carrier's history, says CEO Richard Anderson.

Delta has taken out full-page ads in USA Today, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the Detroit Free Press and the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

US Airways also recently highlighted its 2010 profit sharing -- $650 per employee in 2010.

Cash probably goes a bit further than chocolate!  

Dutch carrier KLM launched its new European business class product yesterday - the centrepiece of which is giving passengers more space by leaving the middle-seat empty.

To illustrate the carrier recruited US comic Matt Chapman to roam candid camera-style around Schiphol Airport invading the personal space of various business travellers. Watch the video here.

While we are on the subject of airlines and videos, if you haven't yet seen it, please join the debate on Mary Kirby's Runway Girl blog about the best airline video virals - SEE THIS BLOG - and we'll have much more on the subject in the March issue of Airline Business.

"Welcome to Air Koryo's airplane of Juche-oriented Korea vigorously advancing towards the Socialist powerful nation by the Songun politics of the Great Leader Comrade Kim Jong Il."

Fortunately the nationalistic gong-bashing settles down fairly shortly into this North Korean Tu-204 safety video, so it can talk about more pressing things, like checking your camera* doesn't "interface to the airplane's equipments", and ensuring you can use a mask for "oxygen breathing" (find yours next to the mannequin).

*It's entirely possible the Pyongyang tourist board might save you the trouble, by confiscating it.

CIT has launched a podcast series dubbed 5 Minute Capital featuring company execs commenting on current markets and trends.

In this addition CIT President of Transportation Finance Jeffrey Knittel shares some insight gleaned from the company's 2011 Global Aerospace Outlook .

Knittel sits down with Stuart Feil, Editoral Director of Forbes Insights, to talk about what lies ahead this year.

For a teaser here's Knittel's take on some of the divergent trends in US, European and emerging markets.

The airlines in the western world are under much more pressure to control costs. You have legacy airlines that are looking at consolidation today. The Delta/Northwest merger, the Continental/United merger, and now we're seeing, even in the low-cost world, the Southwest and Air Tran mergers coming about. That's all a way helping on the revenue side, but, more important driving down costs by becoming more efficient. As they have a bigger system they have more levers to pull to drive down those costs and ultimately increase profitability and shareholder value.

A bit of fun from Virgin Atlantic, which has revealed some of the odder requests made by passengers to cabin crew during flights after a survey of 3,000 of its staff.

Picture credit: Martin Lee/Rex Features

These range from asking for the engines to be turned down as they are too noisy too the slightly surreal question of whether there was a McDonalds onboard. Apart from it being slightly disheartening that somebody is unable to last a 12 hour flight without salivating for a burger, doesn't a flight kind of defeat the object of fast food - if you are on a long flight, its not like you are in rush is it? Anyway here's a link to the list.

Virgin Atlantic cabin crew reveal unusual requests made at 35,000ft

On a vaguely related note, let me point you to a very entertaining blog from my colleague Will Horton based on some funny complaint letters Air New Zealand chief executive Rob Fyfe received and shared during an address at the National Aviation Press Club in Sydney last year - including one critic's comparison of a lounge to those same golden arches.

A lounge worse than McDonald's and service lower than a "snake's scrotum": funny complaints to Air New Zealand

And just to bring it full circle, why not relive the fantastic complaint letter to Richard Brason from a couple of years ago from one disgruntled customer about the onboard meal, featuring this memorable line:

"I know it looks like a baaji but it's in custard Richard, custard."

Ryanair is always announcing new routes, but have you ever pondered how many make the grade?

Here are some interesting comments made by Ryanair deputy chief executive Michael Cawley at a media briefing yesterday which I thought I'd share.

"We will close 10% of the routes we open within a year. If we don't, we are failing," says Cawley.

He explains that most of Ryanair's routes have never been served before and they have no competition.

"We don't know which ones are going to work, but do know 10% won't so we close them and move on. We'll even give away seats for free, so it's not the fare. It's simply a question of whether the demand is there or not."

Cawley claims it costs nothing to close a route which doesn't work because Ryanair uses airport staff to handle its flights, rather than basing its own people overseas.

Interesting insight into how much low-cost giant Ryanair has grown in Italy as its services in the country now account for almost a fifth of its total traffic - now rivalling the UK as its largest market.

Here's an extract from my colleague Victoria Moore's story on our premium news service Air Transport Intelligence.

 

 

Italy is now rivalling the UK as Ryanair's biggest market, following the budget carrier's strong domestic growth in the country.

Ryanair deputy CEO Michael Cawley says Italy now represents around 19-20% of its traffic, depending on the time of year, rivalling the UK which stands at the 20% mark.

He explains this is because the budget carrier now operates around 70 domestic Italian routes, compared with just two in the UK.

Low-cost carriers have made big in-roads into Italy over the last couple of years, in part because of the difficulties of the old Alitalia operation, and the cuts in capacity that followed the creation of a new merged carrier combining Air One and the assets of Alitalia. For more on this see an article I wrote for Airline Business a year ago about the fragmentation of the Italian market.

Ryanair's growth in Italy perhaps underlines a point the airline's chief executive Michael O'Leary made yesterday in releasing its third-quarter results, where he distanced Ryanair's fortunes from those of the struggling Irish economy.

"We are surprised that the widespread negative commentary on the Irish economy has been allowed to cloud some analysis of Ryanair's future growth and profitability.  Some commentators misunderstand that over recent years, due to high airport costs at Shannon and Dublin, as well as rapid capacity growth in lower cost markets like Spain and Italy, Ireland has fallen from over 20% of Ryanair's originating traffic to less than 10% in the current year. Ryanair has little exposure to the Irish economy."