It would figure that an extremely busy week for me would also be a busy news week in the airline world. Though I’ve tried to avoid these short summaries lately, there’s just too much going on for me to do it any other way today. Unfortunately, most of these stories involve angry passengers, long delays, wastes of money, and other things that just make you want to avoid traveling. *sigh*

Delta Airlines, Hypocrite of the Week – PlaneBuzz notes that Delta really had some balls this week by putting out two conflicting press releases on the same day. The first whined about all the air traffic control delays and called for reform. Right afterwards, they announced they were adding MORE flights out of JFK. I’m planning on doing a more in-depth piece on JFK next week. The airport is melting down in the midst of Delta’s insane flight buildup. On beautifully clear days, you’re still looking at long delays. It’s so bad, I would recommend avoiding the airport, yet Delta thinks there’s room for more. Nice work.

Anger Over Apple Juice – As bad as the delays are getting, passengers still need to find a way to control their anger. This flight actually was in the air when someone freaked out about not getting a drink quickly enough and they diverted. As far as I’m concerned, the airline should be charging that guy for the extra costs involved. Now some reports say it was a little kid which makes me wonder if it was Pearl, from Will Ferrell’s epic sketch, The Landlord, embedded below. (Click here if you can’t see it.)

Aloha Means Hello AND Goodbye – One place where we aren’t seeing any delays right now is in Hawai’i, but there are other problems there. The addition of go! to the state’s skies continues to cause huge problems for everyone. Really, nobody is making money out there right now, and nobody is doing worse than Aloha. In its first quarter, the airline lost just over $24m on revenue of only $88m. This is an airline that just came OUT of bankruptcy. This explains why they’ve recently tied up with United. They make United’s financials look good.

NIMBYs First, Safety Second – In yet another step forward for people who moved into the area long after the airport was there, a bill was introduced in Congress to prohibit LAX from separating its two runways on the north side. What do I think? Boooooooo!!!! This is a case where trying to improve the safety of the airport (as they’ve done on the south runways already) is considered to be unimportant compared to the needs of a handful of residents who moved there long after the airport existed. That’s what you get when you move in near an airport. Deal with it.

Gimme My Balls Back – Apparently, eBay gave away some stress balls during its conference, but since the balls contained liquid they weren’t allowed to go through security. I have two thoughts on this. 1) Our security policy is dumb and 2) eBay is dumb for not thinking about that before handing them out. Oh well.

Rockford Airport Gets the Waste of Money Award – As a taxpayer, I’m pissed. Rockford Airport has been subsidizing United Airlines flights to Denver from the city. The agreement is that every flight is guaranteed $7,000. If it makes less, the airport will make up the difference. So far this year, they’ve spent $2.3m on it! The subsidies are apparently so successful that they’re going to extend them. What?!? How is that successful? Yeah, the flights are full, but they’re clearly not making money if you have to drop that much cash. Now if these were local funds, I wouldn’t care, but $1m of that is coming from the feds and that comes out of all our pockets. And this for an airport that’s only 70 miles away from Chicago/O’Hare. These subsidies can’t go on forever. Just give up now and let airlines serve the airport that can make it work on their own (like Allegiant, which serves three cities from Rockford and gets no subsidies). Just think what kind of air traffic control system we could build if the feds stopped funding flights like these.

I know, it sounds funny, right? You never think of Southwest needing a turnaround plan, but yesterday that appears to be exactly what they presented to Wall Street. Why? Well, in the past they were able to hide some of their problems thanks to their excellent fuel hedges. But as those expire, they’ve seen their profits plunge.

On the left, you’ll see a chart from today’s presentation to illustrate the problem. See the whole presentation here (pdf).

Now don’t worry, Southwest-lovers. Even though that drop looks nasty, they still made $93m last quarter, something most airlines would drool over, but it’s not as good as it used to be and Southwest needs to fix things so they stop leaving money on the table.

So what exactly are they doing?

First, as I noted last week, they trimmed their schedule up. Robert Stack did a great job of finding almost all of the routes that were disappearing. He only missed the ever-popular Midland/Odessa to El Paso route. (Looks like a long 292 mile drive through nothingness for the 2 people who used to fly that route.)

But of course, with schedule cuts, they have to put those planes somewhere. Yesterday, we found out where. The airline has decided to bump up service in both Denver and New Orleans with these extra planes. New Orleans residents will be thrilled to get some service back. Southwest has taken an awfully long time to bring their schedule back up there since Katrina. The city will see the return of three daily flights to Birmingham (Alabama) along with an extra flight to Dallas/Love, Las Vegas, and Orlando. Houston/Hobby will get two more flights.

Denver is a different story. That’s a fairly new market for them and there had been rumors that flights hadn’t been doing as well as they’d hoped. Well, they’re definitely throwing everything in there to see if it will stick. The city will get new flights to Albuquerque, Austin, Seattle, Oklahoma City, and Amarillo. Wait . . . Oklahoma City and Amarillo? Ah yes. Thanks to the wonders of the remains of the Wright Amendment, they’re using those flights to be the single stop without plane change service to Dallas/Love. And by the way, Salt Lake and Nashville will each get one more flight on top of what they already have.

There are other increases and decreases as well. If you’d like to dig in and see all the schedule changes for this year, Southwest provided this handy PDF with all the changes. Going forward, they’re slowing long term growth too. Next year instead of taking 34 planes, they’ll only increase their fleet by 19. That may mean fewer deliveries or they may retire/return some older aircraft.

Beyond schedule, what else are they doing?

This press release sums it up broadly, but it’s very vague. I really want to know more.

The first thing that jumped out at me was “Unveil a new boarding/seating method.” Booooooo! I like the cattle car boarding (demonstrated at right, thanks to Leia). It certainly helped America West create the best commercial they’ve ever aired (here (wmv)). But what I really like is that no matter when I book my ticket, I know that I can logon 24 hours before and get an A boarding pass. With an A, I can get my window even if I’m the last one on in that group, and that’s great.

Business travelers never have to worry about paying a ton at the last minute and getting stuck in the middle. It’s the great equalizer. Of course, we don’t know what they’re thinking about doing here, but I’m hoping it’s not too bad.

They also say they’re going to “Enhance its low-fare structure.” Riiiiiight. The goal is to make it more business-traveler friendly, so maybe more refundable fares? What scares me is that I foresee a change fee being implemented. Probably only $25, but that would significantly change the Southwest experience. Any time I see the word “enhance,” alarm bells start going off in my head.

UPDATE 6/28 @ 941a: This AdWeek article describes one of the ads that Southwest is about to roll out. I quote, “two businessmen trapped in a traffic jam offer the cab driver money to get them to the airport on time. After a careening around various urban perils, one asks the other, ‘Is this worth it?’ His partner replies, ‘It’s still cheaper than a change fee if we miss our flight.’” So it sounds like they’re planning to remain change fee-free!

Oh, and they want to “Enhance its Rapid Rewards frequent flyer program.” Again, I get scared. They did customer research that said people wanted a more competitive program. I’m sure that means more destination options. People like to use their miles to go internationally. So that would be great if they do something along those lines, but as usual it will also end up coming with some more restrictions, I’m sure. The name of the game is increasing revenues, so . . . .

To sum it up, the airline wants to find a way to generate more money without destroying what Southwest stands for, and that’s not easy. Catering more to business travelers can help. So will sellling ancillary services like onboard internet and even *gasp* buy on board food products. But they’re going to become a different kind of airline as they continue to find ways to grow. We don’t know much yet, but we can only cross our fingers and hope they don’t blow it.

I know I’ve written about this in the past, but I continue to be amazed at the insanely large number of airline customer service surveys that come out. We have the Wichita St guys doing one, the University of Michigan guys doing another, and JD Power as well.

Today, Maritz Research joined the crowd saying . . . absolutely nothing exciting.

The money quote? That’d be from the director of consulting and strategic implementation at Maritz. “Competing on price is no longer an option for airlines.” Oh really? I’m sure you know best. It’s been shown time and again that price and schedule are really the two main drivers of ticket purchases. Everything else is secondary. So, you’re not going to see them stopping to compete on price any time soon, at least as long as consumers keep shopping that way.

So what did Maritz suggest? Well, the results say that airlines should add a “family section” to their planes and they should make sure they don’t allow cell phones. There has to be more than that, right?

Well, they say that 63% of people are willing to pay for extra legroom and 42% are willing to pay more for food. As far as legroom goes, some people are willing to pay extra for it. That’s why United still has Economy Plus. But when American tried to put more legroom on the whole plane, they couldn’t make it work and reversed the decision. The biggest problem with this survey? Well, just for starters, it’s too simple. How much would more would people pay? Remember, if someone is going to pay a small amount more for more legroom, there’s a decent chance that won’t make up for the lost revenue from having to remove seats from the plane. And it gets a lot more complicated than that.

Going back to the food issue, if 42% of people are willing to pay more, then what’s wrong with a buy on board model? Don’t get me wrong, I hate those stupid snack boxes. But I like the buy on board options where they have fresh food. (Delta’s Song had great stuff.) If I’m hungry, I’ll buy it. If not, I won’t.

In the end, I don’t believe most of these surveys. There’s definitely a bias between what people say they’ll do and what they will do. If you’re taking a survey, sure you’ll say you’d pay for more legroom. But when it comes time to whip that credit card out, you’re still looking at the lowest fare.

Part of this can be blamed on the way airlines sell their products. When we had PriceGrabber Travel up and running, we showed you legroom on flights, but nobody else does that so how can customers even compare? If they could compare, how much more do you think they’d be willing to pay? And how is that impacted by frequent flier program loyalty? There are far more complicated questions that need to be answered to turn these surveys into something useful. They also need to review actual consumer behavior instead of just what people are saying they’ll do.

Unfortunately, most of the surveys we see coming out these days are just fluff and can’t really help effect change.

I just came across this discussion thread on airliners.net that shows the first 787 all put together!

That is one awesome-looking airplane. Check out the size of those engines on that frame. It almost looks like the love-child of a 777 and a 757. (Yes, I know that thinking about airplanes mating means I should see a shrink.)

I really don’t understand the obsession that Midwest Airlines has with dogs.

First, they launched a frequent flier program for them. Fine, that’s a good way to reach dog lovers and probably makes some sense. Then they announced Canine Travel Packs, a “welcome gift” for dogs when they fly. Mmmkay, starting to get creepy.

So yesterday, when they put out a press release entitled, “Midwest Airlines Pampers Professional Pooches,” I could only shake my head and wonder . . . why is the PR team focused on this when they might want to worry a little more about that hostile takeover from AirTran? Maybe they just need some good news to focus on – they haven’t had much of that lately – but pampered pooches?

Not that most of you care, but just in case . . . . That last release was about how they transported two “special canine athletes” from Florida to New York. That’s it. Nothing else. Oy vey.