Hey guys, it’s time for a poll. I’m going to be participating on a panel at the State of DIA event in Denver in March, and I have to pick who to fly. This would be an easy choice if the Frontier flights from Long Beach were operating by then, but they don’t start until May. With four different airlines flying out of LAX, I thought it would be fun to see how you guys would pick.

At last check, all pricing was the same so that’s not a consideration. I won’t have bags, so bag fees don’t matter either. A friend nominated me for Premier Associate on United, so I could sit in Economy Plus, but I’m short so that’s not a requirement. I don’t care about miles.

So, who would you fly? Vote and leave comments with your rationale below.

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[Update 2/12 @ 406p - My decision has been made (though it's actually been made for me). I'll be flying United - see my entire thought process in my detailed comment.]

Cranky Concierge is now a few months into its existence, and things are going very well. We’ve helped out on more than 100 trips and more people are signing up all the time. But with a few months of experience comes the time for tweaks to the model, as I expected. If this were an airline, I would say that we’re positioning ourselves for future financial growth and right-sizing the business to be able to better compete on the global stage.

But I’m not good at bullcrap.

The reality is that some things were priced too high while others were priced too low. Those have been fixed in this new plan. At the same time, we’ve rolled out prepay plans (Cranky Credits) for multiple trips and travel product discounts. Here are the details:

Pricing
The previous model of including both travel planning and assistance just wasn’t working out. Yes, that means it’s time for unbundling. The airlines would be proud. The good news is that it will now be less costly for assistance (starting at $25) but planning will cost more. The geographical areas have been redefined as well. Canada is now considered domestic for pricing purposes. Here’s the plan.

We have also gotten rid of the price hike within 7 days of departure. These prices will be good all the way up to one day prior to travel. At that point, when you need urgent help, this pricing will apply:

Prepaid Cranky Credits
You’ll notice that everything is now priced as a multiple of $25. That was done by design so that we could start offering prepaid Cranky Credits. You can now purchase books of $25 Cranky Credits at a discount. The more you buy, the more you save. You can then use those credits for whatever services you choose in the future. For example.

What kind of discount can you get? Let me show you.

Friends and Family Notification
Now when you’re traveling, we’ll be able to notify friends and family of your departure and arrival times. Have someone picking you up? Just tell us how to get in touch with them and we’ll let them know. All you have to worry about is getting on the airplane.

Travel Product Discounts
Cranky Concierge clients will now be able to get discounts on travel products. For our initial launch, we have discounts from KVS Tool, ExpertFlyer, and Frequent Flyer Master. We have a couple more in progress right now with more planned. Stay up to date with our current list of travel product discounts.

New Concierges
Last but not least, I’d like to introduce our new concierges. Andrew lives in Northern Virginia and is a proud airline dork. Patrick lives in Atlanta and he used to work for the world’s largest airline. Both Andrew and Patrick are now fully trained and have begun handling clients. The three of us are in constant communication to make sure that clients are well-served. This will allow us to handle more clients and expand the business more quickly.

So, that’s a fair bit of news here. Feel free to leave comments down below, and of course, we’ll look forward to helping you at Cranky Concierge some time soon.

Well here we are with part two of my conversation with LAN (see part one here) and you’ll see at the end that we talk about the importance of Japan Air Lines to the South American airline. That’s particularly appropriate since JAL announced today that it would be sticking with oneworld. (see my piece on BNET) I’m sure there are a lot of sighs of relief down in Santiago today since, as you’ll see, JAL is an important partner for the airline.

Cranky: Will the San Francisco flight go beyond Lima?
Pablo: Yes. The plane is going to continue to Sao Paulo. We have a lot of demand there from companies and leisure traffic going to Brazil. But also it will connect with Santiago and Buenos Aires and most of the rest of South America; we fly to more than 50 cities.

Cranky: It’s an interesting hub in the middle of the night in Lima.
Pablo: We’re making some changes actually. We are working right now on what we’re calling internally, the double hub. The one that you flew was in the middle of the night, but we want to have another connection bank in the middle of the day, around noon, so we will have more alternatives for US passengers.

Cranky: Will Los Angeles have a flight that gets in during the day?
Pablo: Yes, we will have both.

Cranky: When it that starting?
Pablo: We are still working on that because there is a lot of work to be done. It should be probably by June or something like that. The same will happen from New York. The feedback is the same, they don’t want to stop in Lima in the middle of the night.

Cranky: I assume there’s not much you can say about the rumors about TAM and LAN potentially working together?
Pablo: Of course. That’s some very confidential information that I don’t even have. What I can tell you is what our CEO has already stated for the last couple years is that for LAN it’s strategic to be in Brazil. We have been working on different alternatives to have something similar to what we have in Peru, Argentina, and now Ecuador. About this rumor with TAM, no we don’t have any concrete information.

Cranky: I was wondering about that with Brazil. Is there a reason you haven’t started LAN Brazil? Are there too many regulatory reasons?
Pablo: Yes, there are a couple of reasons but one of the main ones is the legal structure. In Argentina or Peru, for example, the government helped us to create these companies with local investors. In Brazil it’s much more complicated, because you can’t do that. You can’t have external investors having most of the equity. So in this case, that’s the main reason. Of course, we’ve been evaluating alternatives. Brazil is almost the size of the rest of South America altogether, so for LAN it would almost double the size of the company when we go to Brazil, so we have to be very careful.

Cranky: I’m always interested to watch LAN in South America because you’re obviously the broadest airline down there in terms of covering the continent well. I’m very interested to see what TACA and Avianca are going to do together. I assume you pay attention to them closely?
Pablo: Yeah, definitely. They are an important player now more than before but actually it’s not very threatening to us. We have been dealing with a lot of competition down there. They are not exactly where we are in South America. We believe that we still have important strategic differentiations, and our business model is, I believe, very strong. Of course, we are always looking at the competition. We are realistic.

Cranky: Can we expect further expansion in the US? Are you looking at additional cities?
Pablo: This year we are expecting a lot of growth. For example, out of New York, we are growing our seats 25%. We are growing a lot but more in terms of consolidating our routes and more frequencies, especially for the corporate travelers. Plus this new gateway to San Francisco. Then we might look at expansion like we did a couple years ago to Toronto, the last gateway we opened before SFO. We might evaluate something like Montreal or Vancouver or Chicago but there is no specific project with a concrete date. We know the next cities in terms of traffic that are important are Washington, Chicago, Vancouver, and we’re always evaluating them.

Cranky: I know I’ve heard some people wondering about Washington.
Pablo: Yeah, last year we were almost there. We had everything ready to fly to Washington from Lima a year ago, more or less, but the crisis was much worse than what we expected, especially on the cargo side of the business and then we had to withdraw the project. We expect to fly to Washington in the middle term.

We never start an important route and then drop it. We always start and then we stay there. We work with the community to increase tourism and traffic. That’s probably why we take a little longer on starting projects like this, but I’m pretty sure we’ll go to daily flights out of San Francisco before we reduce capacity.

Cranky: One more question and then I’ll let you go. Oneworld has been in the news a lot lately. Are you guys involved in the package that American, British Airways, and Qantas have put together? Are you happy with oneworld?
Pablo: In general I would say that we are very happy. We are still, even though we’ve been growing double digits over the last 10 years, we are still one of the small brothers. Being part of the AAdvantage program has been very important because we can go with American or with Iberia in Europe. Oneworld has been working well for us. We don’t see any good reason to look for alternatives.

Now, if you see things happen with JAL and Delta and everything is going to be restructured in the next 1 to 2 years, of course we’ll be willing to evaluate things. In markets like the US, it’s a point we use a lot, to promote LAN as part of oneworld because it gives us more awareness as an important world class airline.

Cranky: Do you get much traffic from JAL?
Pablo: I hope they don’t leave. They bring quite an amount of clients to our routes from LA and now we expect to have them in San Francisco, so that’s something we are working on with them.

Cranky: Thanks again for taking the time to speak with me.
Pablo: It was very nice to talk to you.

It’s been awhile since I last put together an Across the Aisle interview. Sure, I’ve spoken with plenty of people, but I haven’t done the straight interview format lately. So, when I was contacted to see if I would be interested in talking to LAN’s VP of North America and Caribbean, Pablo Yunis, I was certainly interested to kick start this series again.

See, LAN just announced it would begin flying to San Francisco from Lima four times a week beginning July 1. LAN is also looking at growing elsewhere in the US and in Peru and Brazil. Beyond that, with oneworld having its share of issues in Asia, I thought it would be great to get a South American perspective on things.

Cranky: Thanks for taking the time to speak with me today. I’m really curious about the San Francisco route because Los Angeles has been on the network for years but San Francisco never has been, right?
Pablo: No, it’s the first time and we are very excited because we’ve been planning this for a very, very long time. We needed to grow in the US and flying directly to a very important gateway like SFO was a huge step for us.

Cranky: How did you determine this was the right time to fly to San Francisco?
Pablo: That’s a good question, because we’ve been planning this for a couple of years and we were seriously thinking about starting it up last year. With the crisis and especially the decreased demand in the cargo business, we put it on standby. In the end, we realized that it’s going to be good timing now because the demand has improved.

It’s a very important gateway because we are not only bringing clients to South America from the US but also from Canada and Asia on the same route. When you combine all those demands, and of course, there are no other carriers flying nonstop to South America, you see the opportunity.

Cranky: Are you taking new 767 deliveries or is this just taking the place of some other flying?
Pablo: We are receiving some 767s this year and also at the same time we are making some changes so we have some more availability in the US. There will be some growth this year that we didn’t expect a year ago.

Cranky: Is this a route, maybe Los Angeles too, that would see 787s? You’re taking delivery of them sooner now, right?
Pablo: The original plan was for 2013. Some rumors are on the news, because of what is happening with some Japanese carriers, we might have something sooner, but it’s not confirmed. I don’t have any dates or anything.

Cranky: Oh, so these are just rumors?
Pablo: I read it myself online like you. We would like to have those 787s as soon as possible. We have a very important growth plan for the next 5 years, so it’s strategic for us to have those planes or alternatives. And we are open to alternatives with either Boeing or Airbus.

Cranky: How did you decide to fly this with LAN Peru aircraft? I know that from LAX, you have one from LAN Peru and one from LAN Chile.
Pablo: This is kind of the way we’ve been growing in South America. In this case, LAN Peru is very well established in Peru, having very good relations with the authorities. Peru looks like the most important in terms of demand from Asia and from the US. That’s why we decided that this project should be under the LAN Peru umbrella. In the end, all this is very internal. In terms of the commercial part, we have only one brand, which is LAN and that’s it. That’s what we want to communicate to our clients. We are one airline, one brand, one service, flying and connecting all of South America to the world.

Cranky: I’m curious about Peru right now especially with all the floods around Machu Picchu and the railroad tracks being washed away. Some people anticipate this will hurt tourism. Is that going to hurt you?
Pablo: It’s important but it’s not as big as you might think. Peru is important to us as a destination and as a way to connect people to other parts of the world. We have been talking to the Peruvian government and the authorities there. The impacts of this could be very large, but for us and for passengers going and coming from Peru it shouldn’t be that that big. They expect to have the railroad fixed within the next 6 to 7 weeks.

On the other hand, Cusco is fully operating and has a lot of attractions different from Machu Picchu. You can go to Cusco today and there is no problem there. Of course, we know that Machu Picchu is an important attraction, so we are doing different things. We are working together with the government tourism group in Peru. We are launching a contingency plan campaign where we lowered our fares aggressively to Peru. We are actually promoting to go to Peru now, because people are very focused on Machu Picchu, but you can go to the rest of Peru. So we have these very low fares already on the web and through travel agencies. We pretty much expect that by March we should have traffic back to normal.

Cranky: My wife and I went to Peru two years ago and flew LAX to Lima on LAN and we went to Cusco and loved it, but in the US people think of Macchu Picchu first.
Pablo: You mention that, it’s very important. The campaign we just talked about, the focus is to say that Peru is much more than Macchu Picchu. Something like “discover the rest of Peru.”

Tomorrow we’ll finish up here with talk about a growing Lima hub, TAM and Brazil, as well as oneworld.

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