on the effing chargers. philip rivers is on the rag, LT didn't eat his wheaties and their head coach is a complete SHMUCK.
oh...did i mention you shouldn't MENTION the chargers?
Food on airplanes is exactly like security at airports. You don't get the actual thing... just the appearance of the thing. To make you think you are being taken care of rather than actually taking care of you.
Instead of a nutritious, delicious and filling meal you get a barrage of raisins, crackers, plastic foil-sealed cuplettes of processed cheese and half-cans of diet soda. Instead of a menu you are given a dispassionate cold-reading of a laminated plastic card by a bitter and tired flight attendant. Wait a tick, wasn't there even a meal for sale on your flight, Pete?
"Only on flights from JFK to LAX or SFO to JFK", the weathered steward uninformatively droned.
This is typical. In fact, in my experience, the airlines have pretty much zero idea about how to actually be a service industry. Two dollar headphones? Five dollar 50mL bottles of Finish Vodka? Five dollars to watch the movie? Are you serious? According to the boarding screen at the airport there were one-hundred-eighty-three passengers on my flight from Salt Lake City to New York. Including twenty-six in First Class seats.
If each of those passengers paid exactly what I did for his or her ticket then Delta Airlines netted somewhere around sixty-thousand dollars. Now, I know fuel is expensive and the trip from The Salty Zion to The Big Apple is a fair number of miles but seriously... a couple hundred sandwiches would kill them?
Although it might not be fair to assume that every passenger paid what I did. As any executive administrative assistant can tell you, depending on a number of variables like umm... the tides at the time of purchase or something, these seats could have been sold for anywhere from a hundred bucks to more than a thousand. All that says to me is that the airlines have seriously over-complicated their entire pricing model. Well, that and that I may have paid too much for my seat. My seat which is functionally identical to the other hundred and fifty seats in the coach cabin. Except that mine came with the handy feature of leaking sub-freezing air through the emergency door into my lap virtually freezing me into a hibernation-like coma. Don't get me started about their so-called blankets.
Call me old-fashioned but doesn't it seem pretty easy to closely estimate the cost of operating a given flight? Then, once you've done that, simply estimate how many passengers are expected on that flight and divide the one number by the other? After that, add your profit, which you'll earn by smiling at me when I pay you for the drink you should have offered me in the first place while I sit comfortably in a seat which actually reclines. Then you charge this price for seats on this flight starting at the first moment the tickets are made available and ending with the time the wheels leave the ground.
Of course if they did all that people might actually want to travel by air again and airlines like Delta wouldn't find themselves at the end of another fiscal year surprised that they had no idea how much money they were actually going lose before they are forced into another annual bankruptcy. And what would be the fun in that? Making money is very overrated, apparently.
To their credit, I was able to watch Sunday Night Football live and in its entirety courtesy of in-flight DirecTV. Too bad for the San Diego Chargers that didn't show up to enjoy it as much as I did.
Filed under - Travelon the effing chargers. philip rivers is on the rag, LT didn't eat his wheaties and their head coach is a complete SHMUCK.
oh...did i mention you shouldn't MENTION the chargers?
Jet Blue: they fly from SLC to NY.
Cheap, and yes, you get what you pay for. But better than getting ripped off.
And you can totally bring on your own food. (But pizza tends to cause a lot of glances around the cabin.)
I had to write a paper on how airlines price their tickets for economics, back a hundred years ago when I actually went to college. It's a pretty complex system, using variables such as avoiding empty seats, maximizing total revenue, encouraging fliers to take flights on unpopular dates, and - perhaps most importantly - airline competition. That's why you could end up sitting next to someone who's paid $100 more or less than you did for the exact same flight. It all depends on when you book your flight.
Also, American Airlines is the devil.
My point is that their system is entirely too complex and that complexity is, in the end, harming them.
It clearly doesn't work or they wouldn't all be bankrupt.
Avoiding empty seats is done by providing good service at a good price. Then, jubilee! everybody loves to fly.
When you book your flight is not a good enough reason for a price change in any pricing model that actually works.
Home | About | Fresh Fiddley | iBlog | Buy Swag | Archive | Search | Contact | Blogroll | BLOW | Mobile | Login/Register
You don't even want to talk about what my company paid for me to take a dirty (and I mean dirty) flight in BUSINESS class no less on United to Asia. And the food was sucky too.
I have flown United to Europe and had a great experience in Business Class but that was a few years ago. Flight to Asia was this year. And I was really disappointed. At least they didn't charge me for the crappy food or the drinks.