I must admit that as a reader, I’m not a fan of corporate blogs. Any time a company is in charge, it inevitably restricts what bloggers can say. (As you can tell, I’m clearly not sponsored by anyone.) There are plenty of companies who just put corporate blogs out there, because they don’t know anything about the web except that they need to have a presence. So, you see these crappy corporate blogs put up that tell you very little and are nothing but a marketing tactic.

Sometimes, however, you get a company that sees the value of the blog. Southwest is one of those companies. They’ve learned that a blog can be a very valuable customer feedback tool. Sure the blog is sanitized and you’ll never see a bad word printed about the airline, but there is some good to come out of it that makes it worth reading if you fly the airline.

When they started testing assigned seating last summer, the CEO posted about it and asked for comments. Sure enough, more than 600 comments were posted and I have no doubt that they read each one. They say those comments directly impact decision-making.

Today, another change was made supposedly due to feedback on a previous post. As many of you know, Southwest only keeps their schedule open for a certain period of time in advance of travel. They don’t tell anyone when the next part of the schedule will open, so it becomes a guessing game. You can guess from past experience about when it will happen. Then you either have to keep checking online, keep calling reservations, or wait for the message to show up on Ding! before you can make the booking.

Well now they’ve decided to change the policy due to, at least in part, the nearly 300 replies to that post explaining how they do what they do. Now, according to the post, they will inform their reservations agents and post on their website the dates when they will start selling tickets for future travel.

Is it true that the blog comments directly impact the decision-making process?  I have no idea, but I would bet that it does.  It’s just another form of customer communication but it is from a different target market.  Southwest still doesn’t accept email comments from their website (boooooo), so people writing comments on blogs are probably a lot different than those taking out a piece of paper and writing down their thoughts.  I would think they take the comments just as seriously as they take hand-written letters.

It’s that open pipe of communication that makes a corporate blog so valuable. And even if I don’t enjoy reading the completely sanitized content, I’ll continue to read because I know that I can have an impact on future decisions the airline makes.

It’s tax day here in the US, and even though we got two extra days this year, there is no such thing as a “happy” tax day. If you got a refund, that means you gave the government a no interest loan. Booooo. If you owed tax, well, you had to shell out the cash. So, let’s forget about that and delve into the world of airlines instead.

• Delta Cans the Dress Code – No, don’t worry. There never was a dress code for people who pay for tickets. But you may have noticed the nicely dressed passengers sitting in the worst middle seat on the plane. Yeah, those are the faithful airline employees trying to use their benefits to fly somewhere fun, even if it requires sitting in the middle of the section of five seats. Every airline has a dress code for these people. Generally it requires at least a collared shirt and khakis for guys up front and jeans and closed-toed shoes in the back. Well, Delta has decided that in a world where paying customers have no problem showing up in flip flops and t-shirts, having a dress code for employees makes them stand out like a sore thumb. At least, I’m guessing that was their rationale. Now, nonrevs (that’s non-revenue passengers) can wear anything paying passengers can wear so they can blend in better. Now if we could just get those non-revs to stop wearing their badges when they fly . . . .

• Don’t Like Your Seat? Pay up – American has made the decision to charge customers $15 to change their seat assignment over the phone if they didn’t book the ticket directly through American. They say this brings them in line with other airlines, but I can’t remember hearing of this before. Who else does this? Basically if you don’t book directly, you can only change your seat for free if you do it online or via a touch tone system. If you need to speak to a human, you’ll have to pay. Add this to the growing list of things you can’t do over the phone without paying. Maybe they’ll just get a 900 number to make it easier for billing purposes.

• Delta Goes Heathrow – Delta certainly didn’t waste any time here. Even though European open skies is still a year away, Delta has already gone ahead and secured the slots at London/Heathrow in anticipation. It sounds like they were able to get the slots from Air France/KLM, and I’m sure it cost them a pretty penny. But now they’ll be able to fly twice a day to New York/JFK and once a day to Atlanta. I would imagine the Atlanta flights would do well, but JFK, not so much. Virgin already has four a day, American six a day, and British Airways seven daily. Throw in Air India and Kuwait and you have a pretty full market. Two daily flights from Delta may serve connections to smaller cities in the Northeast US better than anyone else at JFK, but those people could easily go over other airports as well.

• Regular or Lite? – Last week India’s Jet Airways picked up Air Sahara in a takeover deal. Instead of merging them into the Jet operation though, they’re going to keep them separate as a mix between low cost and full service. What’s the name? Jetlite. Now first I thought it was the name of some weird new supermodel like Strangé, but then I realized it was supposed to be pronounced “Jet-light” and not “Jet-leet.” Ah, makes much more sense now.

A friend of mine passed along a Boeing presentation called “Boeing 787 Dreamliner Flight Deck Safety, Comfort, Efficiency” (also posted here in PDF format). Most of the information in there isn’t going to get the average traveler excited, but this picture was just too cool to pass up:

As you can imagine, this plane will be packed with all kinds of technology to help improve flight safety including dual heads-up displays (where they project the vital instruments in the window so neither pilot has to look down) and an airport moving map so the pilots can figure out where they on on the airfield. This is especially important when visibility is poor, and it could have helped prevent accidents like the Comair one in Kentucky last year. That aircraft took off on the wrong runway which unfortunately happened to be too short.

There’s a lot more than just that, of course, but you get the idea. They’ve also gone and cleaned up the cockpit layout as compared to the 777. What do I mean by that? Well . . .

As you can see, instead of 22 separate instruments/radios on the main control panel, there are now only 12. The ones that remain have bigger screens to make life easier for the pilots. The plane rolls out in less than three months, and the anticipation is building.

It’s incredible to me that the plane has already surpassed 500 orders from 43 companies and it hasn’t even rolled out yet. Boeing has a habit of beating expectations in terms of performance, and I really hope for their sake that’s the case this time. So far, they say all is good.  This is easily one of the most anticipated aircraft of all time.

A few months ago, the powers that be at LAX (that’d be LAWA) decided they were going to raise the rents on the airlines flying out of the airport. It has since become a soap opera with the parties trading barbs back and forth. Now, United has decided to bring customers into the spat, so it’s time to see what exactly is going on here.
LAWA says that the cost of running the airport has gone up significantly since 9/11 (security costs and all) and the airlines need to start paying their fair share. It’s clear that they need more money – according to their annual report (PDF), the year ending June 30, 2006 saw an operating loss of $10m – but I’m not sure who should be responsible for that shortfall.

Predictably, the airlines don’t think it should be their problem, and they started complaining about this 5 seconds after it was announced. Until now it was just a war of words (and lawsuits), but Wednesday United announced they were putting a $10 surcharge on all flights out of LAX to make up for the difference. (US Airways has matched and only Southwest promised they would not.) The airline says that the rent increase will cost them $10m a year, so they need this surcharge to offset that cost.

LAWA quickly shot back at the airline saying that in 2006, United had about 4.9m passengers fly out of LAX. If traffic doesn’t grow at all, they’ll still rake in $49m a year with this surcharge. That’s a lot more than the $10m in increased costs for United, so almost $40m will go to increasing profitability.  (Hey, you have to pay Tilton’s bonus somehow.)  Unfortunately though, LAWA’s math is all wrong.

So what is the story here?

I’ve been digging around the last couple days, and I haven’t found the exact info I wanted, but I think I’m close enough. Back in February, LAWA put out a press release about this issue but only in regards to airlines using Terminals 1 and 3. (United is in Terminals 6, 7, and 8.) In the release, they say that the total costs will increase from $6 per enplaned passenger to $11 per enplaned passenger. For the rest of this analysis, let’s assume United also will see a cost of $11 per enplaned passenger once this increase is in effect.

That is a pretty hefty increase, but the result is hardly out of line with other airports.  This presentation (PDF) shows 2005 airport costs on the second page of the document. Houston/Intercontinental and Chicago/O’Hare appear to be in the same range as LAX. Washington/Dulles, Miami, and San Francisco are well above. (It should be noted that SFO has reduced costs significantly since then – they’re now down under $15 per passenger, still $4 above LAWA’s charge.)

So, LAWA needs the money, and United has decided that they aren’t willing to shoulder the burden so they’re going to pass it on to us travelers. Honestly, I think they’re just trying to make a statement to LAWA here and they have no intention of leaving this out there. My guess is that they just want to get the public angry at LAWA but instead it will backfire against the airline.  BUT, let’s take them at their word here for a second to answer the burning question.

Is that $10 surcharge really going to make up the $10 million United has to pay in additional costs? LAWA’s math is definitely not right on this one, so let’s do some of our own.

LAWA says United had about 4.9m passengers board planes at LAX last year. That number actually appears to be only United mainline flights and NOT Express even though those should be included. United sets fares and takes in the revenue for most of the Express flying, so that needs to be counted.  Including Express, they actually boarded in the neighborhood of 6.2m passengers. Does that mean that United will actually pull in $62m in a year?!? Nope, not at all.

Thanks to the guys at FareCompare for passing along the fare rules here. In short, the surcharge only applies to people flying from Los Angeles who are NOT connecting. So here are the scenarios:

• Someone goes from LAX to Chicago and back. That’s $10 for the first flight out of LAX.
• Someone comes to LAX from Chicago and goes back. That’s $10 for the return flight from LAX.
• Someone goes from LAX to Chicago one way. That’s also $10 for the one flight out of LAX.
• Someone goes from Chicago one way to LAX. There is no surcharge since no flight left LAX.
• Someone goes from Chicago to Maui connecting in LAX both ways. There is no surcharge because the fare was from Chicago to Maui and the stop in LAX doesn’t count in fare rules.

So even though LAWA wants us all to think that every United passenger departing LAX will pay, that’s clearly not the case. Connecting passengers don’t pay and that’s a big chunk of the people coming through the airport.

That being said, I’m not letting United off that easily. We know they have 6.2m passengers departing, so to generate only $10m from the surcharge, a mere 16% of the passengers flying United would have to be starting or ending their trips at LAX. That’s way too low, so United is in fact going to make a lot more money than they let on.

All this is making my head hurt.  In the end, LAWA wants more money from the airlines to run the airport.  The airlines are passing it on to the customer, which is fine, but they’re raking in a lot more than they need to cover the extra costs, which is not fine.  And as usual, there’s nothing we can do about it.

Any time China announces they’re interested in getting into a market, people perk up and listen. I guess having over 1 billion people will do that for you.

So when China said they wanted to get into the commercial aircraft manufacturing business, I would assume Boeing and Airbus started drawing up battle plans. It may sound crazy now, but think back to the 1970s for a little perspective. At the time, Airbus was just getting started with their first plane, the A300. Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, and Lockheed all scoffed at their attempt. Fast forward and you know the rest of the story. Lockheed pulled out of the commercial market and McDonnell Douglas was swallowed by Boeing. Now the company that was laughed at in the 1970s has proven to be Boeing’s only true competitor.

There’s no reason that same thing can’t happen with China. The country has a very large sphere of influence and could likely sell aircraft through Asia, Africa, and South America with just a little political pressure. If they create a truly impressive plane, low prices and financing deals could make this take off very quickly. The idea of flying on a Chinese-made plane may sound funny now, but let’s see how it sounds in 20 years.