Marketing and pricing: September 2008 Archives

Its runway is the second longest in the state, and even Air Force One has landed there. It's right on the edge of one of the wealthiest regions in the nation, and sits near the junction of two major intestate highways. So why won't anyone fly to Hagerstown, Maryland, where the 7,000-foot runway was completed late last year at a cost of about $62 million? Just west of the wealthy Montgomery County suburbs of Washington DC and just north of Virginia's very wealthy hunt and wine country, the Hagerstown Regional Airport has been without scheduled passenger flights since the end of September 2007 when Air Midwest ended its service. Under the US Airways Express rubric, Air Midwest flew 19-seaters under federal subsidy between Pittsburgh and Hagerstown. But now, we hear that the airport may be about to announce new service.

The snappiest new airport terminal to open in North America for a good long while could well have your name on it. Or your company's. That's because in Detroit, where a new terminal is set to open on September 17, the airport owners, the Wayne County Airport Authority, are open to suggestions. They've hired a Denver company named General Sports Alliances to sell the naming rights to the new $430-million facility at Detroit Metro, the eleventh busiest US airport. People think this is the first time an airport has sold naming rights, although it's fairly common for airlines to pay to put their name on a sports facility or the like. Even the old USAir put its name on sports arena that used to be called the Capital Centre, in suburban Washington, although the airline changed its name and then moved to Arizona, while the Centre was imploded and then torn down.

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Full retreat is the only way to describe it. Volte-face or flip-flop would also do, but what it means is that United has given up on its plan to cut out free meals for  passengers flying in the back of the plane between Dulles and Europe and instead charge the flyers as much as $9 for a buy onboard meal. The proposal - an industry first - outraged many flyers and indeed corporate customers, who deluged such sites as FlyerTalk with their angry postings. Evidently they deluged United as well, and the airline has now changed its mind. We understand that the go-to-bed-without-dinner experiment was the brainchild of Dennis Cary, the United senior veep for marketing who joined from American some four or five years ago; Graham Atkinson, the charming and long-suffering Englishman whose present title at the Chicago-based airline is chief customer officer, opposed.