Recently in Strategies and tactics Category

A rare grumbling is heard. Or seldom is heard a discouraging word at least at Southwest Airlines. But the airline's pilots union seems to have joined their cross-town counterparts at American Airlines in criticising their management. But there's a big difference: the Allied Pilots Association at American is making its very loud grumblings in any forum it can find. But over at Southwest, what dissatisfaction there is comes

within the family, as it were: on the corporate blog.The Southwest Airline Pilots Association and indeed other LUV employees have used the Nuts About Southwest blog to jump on the airline's plans for a code share with Mexico's Volaris. Says one, "As an employee, I'm disgusted with the continued outsourcing of our jobs. I guess the company loves us all, unless they can find someone to do the job that we could do for cheaper. This is just one step closer to 'Southwest the travel agent,' not 'Southwest AIRLINES.'"

Just in time for the holiday rushes, the TSA says it will have its so-called self-select checkpoint lanes at all of the nation's airports by the middle of this month. This is a very good thing - if it works. The concept is relatively simple: instead of letting all airport passengers just line up and then get delayed behind the state legislator who forgets he has a .357 magnum in his briefcase ("darn, I forgot"), you can let people who think they know what they're doing get in a lane for other smart people and the people who know they don't know what they're doing get in another lane. And you can have a third lane for people who aren't sure where they should go. Are you following?

At United, they're doing some interesting things like announcing the first sale on an ancillary charge that we've seen. United is running a promotion that gives a 20% discount if travellers pay their first-bag fee on line by February 1 of next year. And the airline pulled back on its plans to raise the fee to check a second bag. The increase, set for Monday, from $25 to $50, followed moves by others, but instead it will stay at $25. The new chief marketing and customer officer, Dennis Cary, says "we are listening to our customers." Cary said this before when he took back United's plan to charge for food on international flights and to rescind its long-standing policy of giving a 500-mile minimum credit to its frequent flyers. 
The carrier has done a few more interesting things: it has rejigged united.com so that passengers can go on-line and pay fees for checked bags, which should save time at the airport, or they can purchase United's Award Accelerator, which lets members of its Mileage Plus frequent-flyer plan multiply the number of points they earn per trip.

Neither of these rivers is the Seine: Those guys down there in Atlanta have a lot to celebrate, what with the merger and the stock options and all, but we think they should stop drinking the left-over champagne. They just announced two new routes to Paris that have left us puzzled: Delta (yes, Delta, which includes Northwest) is going to fly from Pittsburgh, where it now has almost zero flights, and from Raleigh/Durham NC, where it has even fewer flights, starting next March. We are perplexed.

 

Over at Delta, they're using the takeover last week of Northwest Airlines to justify "an alignment and harmonization" of policies. This means that Delta, the last big holdout among network carriers on charging a fee for a first bag, will begin doing so, starting in December. It will charge $15 for the first bag and $25 for a second bag. This isn't all bad because it's half off the current second bag fee of $50; the usual elites are exempted. Steve Gorman, Delta's chief operating officer, says customers aren't making a differentiation between the airline and its fee-charging rivals. Delta also cut some other fees, like buying a ticket over the phone, which drops from $25 to $20, so it's REALLY not all bad.

New from the small change department, bureau of nickels and dimes. Left Field was on the NPR (National Public Radio) show Morning Edition, blabbing about airline fees and charges and the prospect for change. (as it were.) Click on this link to listen, but here are a few more things for the complainers to complain about, including the US Airways plan to start selling pillows and blankets on board and a move by United to show you that they may be skin-flints charging you for your checked bag - but it's still a better deal than the famed overnight purple machine.
US Airways tells its employees in their most recent newsletter that that it doesn't yet have a date for selling the blankies and pillows, but they'll costs about $7, while United says that if you don't trust it to carry your bag and you don't want to pay them, that's okay. You can check it into FedEx when you check in at United, but it will cost: $149 for a flight under 1,000 miles, and $179 for longer flights. This is only avaible on domestic flights. Before you start complaining, this is less than some of the existing bag-schlepping services: $325 to $375 was the quote for an overnight bag delivery from one of the companies that specialises in carrying unaccompanied bags.

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

Okay, here's Ryanair again, taking on the on-line guys. This time it's a pretty well established player, though: Expedia. Ryanair says it is ending its hotels booking deal with Expedia in November because the On-line Travel Agency has not honoured the payment terms of their deal. The OTA, based near Seattle in Bellevue, was the only third-party hotels seller allowed on the Ryanair website, and it disputes the airline. They've paid, they say, and "strongly believe that Ryanair does not have the right to terminate our agreement," Expedia said in a statement from its chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi. Expedia won the business in March, 2007, ousting needahotel.com, a Travelport unit. The five-year, private-label deal was supposed to lead to big things for Expedia - despite the fact that Ryanair chief Michael O'Leary had once called Expedia "dead." We will leave it to you to speculate as to the motives of the players, but note that Ryanair's chief operating officer, Michael Cawley, says the airline's already been approached by other hotel distributors.   

In the midst of all of the bad news, someone has to find something good to talk about. So OAG, which used to be the Official Airline Guide, says that some startup routes constitute the good news. If it is, it's slim: OAG leapt on the shift of Houston Bush Intercontinental service London's airport from Gatwick to Heathrow, a move that was made possible by Open Skies, and it said that a flight by Caribbean Airlines between Tobago and Port of Spain is among the busiest, with almost 15,000 seats a week. We have no idea how many of those seats are filed, but we did find some real good news in the list: a top new international route is a new route between Newark's Liberty International Airport and the Toronto City Centre airport in Canada, operated by Porter Airlines. Porter is quite happy with the route, says spokesman Brad Cicero, who calls it Porter's "most successful new destination to date."

They got planes flying over it, they got planes landing on it, but they're not using it yet. It is the third runway at SeaTac, the Seattle/Tacoma International Airport, a project that's been debated, disputed and delayed for about 20 years now, but is finally just about ready to open. And this 8,500-foot runway may well do more for the national airspace system and for airline delays than new airport terminals at Raleigh/Durham or New York JFK.