October 2008 Archives

Maximum minima: used to be, you'd get a bunch of miles even if your flight was a really short one. The minimum frequent-flyer dollop was 500 miles, even if you flew a shuttle that was 225 miles, the distance between New York and Washington or New York and Boston. That is changing, with US Airways among the first of the big guys to change the rules, and with United doing the same cutting. Now American has cut back on minima, saying that you can't have 500 miles for every flight, but instead, you will earn the same number of points as the actual number of miles flown, starting with the New Year.

Another exemption: when the airlines starting imposing extra fees to check a bag, the screamers were loud and clear. But the exemptions weren't. And this ancillary pricing had a number of exceptions, exemptions and specifications. If you were flying on a full fare, if you were a member of the elite level of an airline's frequent flyer plan, if you in uniform, you were exempt.

Now comes word from Continental that you can be exempt from the bag fee depending on how you pay. The carrier, based at the Houston Intercontinental airport and the major carrier at Newark, NJ's Liberty airport, said that you don't have to pay the first bag fee - $15 - if you own or hold a Chase Bank card (or debit card) that is a co-branded Continental card. If you have the card and are a member of its Presidential Plus level, you can check up to two bags without charge

American Airlines must have bigger fish to fry, or boats to rock. It settled its dispute with Kayak.com, a so-called meta-searcher that compares fares from many sites. Kayak, American said, was referring customers who clicked on fares for American and its partners not to American's own website, as was intended under their contract, but instead was sending clicks to another retailer's website.  This is perhaps counterintuitive, but it is the way that metasearchers have evolved: make a lot of data available but, after the clicker decides what he or she wants, take him or her where you want. In this case, Kayak, which is privately held, and its sidestep unit, were sending its American queries to Orbitz.com and another Orbitz-controlled site, cheaptickets.com. American decided that this was perhaps not what it wanted, since it let kayak use its fare data so that it, not Orbitz, would make money from actual bookings.

On a serious note, folks: people do agree that even if you wanted to regulate the airlines it would be tough, and that probably you shouldn't. That was pretty clear from a workshop that the Justice Department put on the other day. The agency's Antitrust Division, the keen-eyed lawyers a and equation-happy economists who decide if airlines can merge or if they're doing bad things like fixing fares or colluding or meeting in smoke-filled rooms (left), etc.One Justice Department  economist, Rene Kamita, noted that the State of Hawaii had treed to regulate fares on local routes among the Islands but that the agency and congress had kept it from doing so, and meanwhile fares on the local routes had gone down and service had increased. It's too easy to dismiss talk of airline reregulation as simple nonsense: the Obama administration-in-waiting isn't just beholden to regulators like organized labor but is also tied in with the passenger rights movement, which some see as a stalking horse for reregulation. And Bob Crandall, the former American Airlines chief, has become a leading voice for "moderate price regulation." One of the airline economists, Severin Borenstein, noted that airlines hadn't been a particularly stable industry before deregulation and so you couldn't really expect it to be so now.

Okay. We still like AirTran. They have resisted a few ugly things that clearly have tempted them, like charging for the first checked bag or advertising inside the airplane. The outside of the airplanes have lots of marketing stuff on them, but they're all AirTran ads, like the image of racecar driver Danica Patrick that they slapped on the side of a 717. But now the carrier, which has almost all of its operations at Atlanta, has begun advertising in the skies over the city of Peachtrees.

(The picture above, from Flickr, is from an aerial effort a few years back Down Under.)

Okay, this is not something we do every day but today we will because it is the thirtieth anniversary of airline deregulation. The debate (let's re-regulate the airlines) is pretty much over because it would (choose your cliché) be hard to unscramble the omelette, put the toothpaste back in the tube, or undo the underpinnings of a massive system. (Choose as many as you'd like.) But with Barack Obama likely heading to the White House in January, in part because he has vowed a thorough overhaul of financial regulation, drug regulation, and housing regulation, we will refer loyal Left Fielders to a post by our friend Bill Swelbar. His Swelblog takes a good look at what happened and how it happened and where we're going and things like that. Bill is always worth reading, even if you agree with him on most everything.

JetBlue finally did open its new and delayed New York JFK terminal, T5; the airline, which is based just a few miles away in Queens, New York, insisted that it had been ready to go last month, when it did a formal ceremonial opening, but that some of the vendors in the new digs weren't ready to go yet. It delayed because it had seen how bad the passenger experience can be when an opening isn't an opening. This Wednesday's real opening, which included a live blog, also featured some pictures that JetBlue put up on Flickr, sort of live. One of them, showing what the architect calls the terminal's 'curvilinear' form, is to the left. More pictures here.  

There they go again, those pesky United pilots. Now they're saying the airline's chief, Glenn Tilton, should leave because he bought some fuel hedges and United lost money on them. This is outrageous, says the union, because Tilton used to be at Chevron Texaco. "How is it that an oil man such as Glenn Tilton can't figure out how to stem losses from hedging jet fuel?" asked Captain Steve Wallach, chairman of the United Chapter of the Air Line Pilots Association. "This latest reported loss is a real head-scratcher. It took him too long to realize the value of hedging, and then he entered the market too late," says Wallach. For the first time in a (very) long time, we feel some sympathy for Glenn, mostly because for once it's not his fault.

Don't let the title mislead you. This is not a book - or a site - about living high. It's about flying high and the lifestyle that we'd all like to have when we're off the plane as well as on the plane and sitting up front. It's British Airways' fancy in-flight book, BA High Life, and the carrier is putting it on line. After 35 years if publication, bahiglife.com has plenty of content, and is a showcase for fancy living and life style ads.

It comes shortly after BA launched another site, MetroTwin, which is intended as an interactive community for people who fly between London and New York and who live in one, the other, or both. But BA High Life is not interactive, and our friend Tim Hughes, the Australian on-line travel guru, says he wonders why it doesn't seem to have offers to book flights to the places that it writes about. What we're curious about is just how another luxury-goods title will compete in a very crowded marketplace - and one in which the prospects for selling that $3,000 bag are fading as we write.

You knew it was bad, but it seems to be getting worse. The number of domestic US flights is set to fall by almost 11% and capacity by 9% in the fourth quarter of 2008 compared to a year ago, according to OAG. OAG, which used to be the Official Airline Guide, which just revised its August estimate. The domestic market will account for 21.4 million of the cutback in available seats, or 46% of the global decline, and a staggering 59% of the global drop in frequencies with 265,000 fewer flights.

It's another battle for hearts and minds. Virgin Atlantic came out with its new site against the British Airways antitrust linkup with American airlines and Virgin's chief executive Steve Ridgway came to Washington to make his case. The last time Virgin battled against a linkup between the two oneworld partners, it painted the sides of many of its planes with the slogan, 'No Way BA/AA'; that was more than a decade ago and since then airlines and advocates have found that they can reach more eyeballs through the 'net. (They're painting some planes, anyway, and putting pictures of Virgin's founder, Richard Branson, up on the web.) You can look at the dueling websites here.

You can get your money back, but only if you pay more. That's the way airfares work, and have since Air Canada led the airline industry off into the unbundling of fares and services. AirTran offers refundable fares and Southwest does as well, both in the higher fare categories, but some low-fare airlines were a tad slow to adopt this facet of fares, in part because they had long held that low fares were, by definition, not refundable. That began changing when JetBlue decided in January that it would offer fully refundable fares in a bid to get more corporate and business travel. Businesses travellers like refundability because it means that when their plans are changed at the last minute, they can get their money back. Comes now Virgin America, which says it will make refunabilty the centrepiece of a new fare class it is calling Main Cabin Select. (Above is the main Main Cabin.)