This whole US Airways/Delta slot swap in DC and New York just keeps dragging on and on. Have you had enough yet? Just wanna see it end? I’m with you, but the fight continues, and Delta and US Airways are done playing nice. In their latest filing with the feds (I can’t find it on regulations.gov so you can download here), they take aim at the FAA for not having the jurisdiction to require divestiture and at Southwest for, well, being a punk, it seems.

The filing starts off as you might expect, with a summation of their new plan to sell slots to a few other carriers and an explanation that it is so totally awesome, the FAA should be all over it. You know the deal, but as a refresher, they’ll give 5 slots each to Spirit, WestJet, and AirTran at LaGuardia along with 4.5 slots at National. Actually, I didn’t know it was 4.5 slots until I saw this, but I assume they’ll just get the other half slot during an off peak time where slots are currently available. Otherwise, that plane will be stuck at National forever.

After we get past the formalities, they start revving up the anti-Southwest machine. Why should the feds approve this deal and not require an auction of slots?

. . . unlike an auction, which would likely lead to Southwest obtaining all the slots, the modified transaction transfers slots to multiple carriers.

Oooh, slam. Why are they hating on Southwest? Well, first of all, they say:

For it’s part, Southwest simply seeks to exploit this transaction to obtain a competitive advantage for itself.

Also, Southwest filed comments that they’re strongly against the deal, and now Delta and US Airways are letting it rip. They go on and on about how Southwest has had numerous opportunities to get in to National yet they haven’t done it. That’s true. If you really want in, you can find a way, but apparently getting slots from Delta and US Airways are not going to be an option.

Delta and US Airways may not be thrilled with Southwest these days, but they’re pretty happy about American and JetBlue. See, the American/JetBlue swap gives JetBlue even more of a presence at National which, in their eyes, makes for better competition (or so they hope the FAA believes). But regardless of which airlines they love and which they hate, they reserve much of their wrath for the feds. At one point, they even offer a (very) thinly veiled threat of legal action.

Approving the proposed modified transaction would also have an additional important benefit for the FAA. It would allow the FAA to avoid acting in a manner that would subject it to legal challenge. The parties retain the right to challenge any imposition of a divestiture condition, and such litigation would be likely if the modified transaction is not approved.

I won’t bore you with all the details. I mean, these guys must be paying the lawyers a lot, because they’ve cited a lot of precedent and highlighted many inconsistencies in great detail. You can read through this lengthy document on your own. In my eyes, there really were two points that stood out.

1. The DOJ’s claim that the FAA’s proposed divestitures will not interfere with the transaction’s benefits ignore the parties’ unequivocal statement that they will not go forward with the transaction as conditioned by the FAA.
2. [The DOJ] completely fails to acknowledge the loss of service to small and medium communities that would likely result from its proposal.

I think both these points are important, though the first one has lost some of its power. They seemed to be pretty certain that this deal wouldn’t get done if they had to give any slots away, but they came back with a modified proposal that offered just that. Do I believe this is the absolute final deal? You know, maybe if you get them in a room they could go back and forth a little bit but I doubt we would see any substantial changes going forward. It’s take it or leave it.

That second point is the one that I think is always overshadowed here. You get a low cost carrier in there and they are going to fly on routes that already have flights. They’ll look at the Bostons, the Chicagos, the Atlantas, and the Floridas. While it’s certainly nice to have more competition in those markets, it’s also important to offer more diverse flying opportunities. The low cost carriers won’t serve the small cities, but US Airways and Delta will. That’s why the smaller cities are lining up to support this swap. They want service, and I don’t blame them.

This filing takes on a pretty aggressive tone, and that’s kind of fun to watch. It appears that they certainly are ramping up for a lawsuit if necessary, but hopefully that’s just posturing and it won’t need to get to that point. I still think this swap is the right thing to do.

Of course, if the once-again-hot rumors of a US Airways/United merger are true, this deal is completely toast. But that’s a post for another day, if these rumors ever become more substantial.

I’ve written here before about the importance of good, quick communication when it comes to dispute resolution in the world of social media. Most notably, United’s confrontation with a broken guitar made headlines, but there are countless examples from around the web every day. Today, let’s talk about the saga of Chris Heuer and his flight on American.

Chris was on American flight 177 last week from New York to San Francisco, and he is not a happy man. In fact, he wrote a blog post entitled “The Broken Promises of American Airlines.” This can’t be good.

To make things worse, this is a guy who clearly doesn’t trust American in the first place. For example, he checked Flightview to see if his flight was going on time instead of relying on American to actually let him know. While he was on Flightview, he noticed that the plane had been swapped from a 767 to a 757 and that’s when it got ugly.

From Chris’ perspective, he was told he’d have a seat in First class, then he didn’t. He was told he’d leave at a certain time, then he didn’t. He just wasn’t getting the information he needed. Chris doesn’t know the airline industry, but he has an audience, and that makes him dangerous. Misinformation can be spread so quickly that American needed to step in and respond quickly. They apparently didn’t do a good enough job, so I’ll do it. (Others have tried via Twitter, but it hasn’t exactly been taken very well, so hopefully he’ll be willing to listen here.)

How can I be given a seat from one point in the system and then have it taken away in another?

He was given a new boarding pass for the 757 in First Class, but then he was pushed down to coach later. Though I obviously don’t know exactly what happened, my guess is that they hadn’t finished re-seating everyone so when he received his first boarding pass, they had yet to use whatever algorithm they use for determining who gets downgraded when there are fewer seats to be had up front. Since he was on an upgrade, he certainly was a prime target. It sucks, but it should be easily explainable.

As for bringing an old ass plane like that out to fly us across the country, well I know the economics of maintaining an older fleet and the huge cost for modernizing it so I understand why you HAVE to do it, but I don’t like it and I may leave you if I get stuck on too many more of these when I could be flying in comfort on Virgin or Jetblue instead.

It’s really not an issue of a plane being old but really just the interior. Possibly the funniest thing here is that he’s complaining that his 767 was taken away and replaced with an old 757. Well guess what? That 757 looks like it was aircraft N680AN, a 757 that had its first flight in 1999. Those 767s that usually ply the JFK-SFO route? The newest one is from 1988.

It turns out, that the woman sitting next to me, also saw there were no seats available on the seating chart last week. But instead, the smaller 757 we flew had plenty of open seats on it. Meaning the original 767 was way underbooked, else there would have been a huge problem trying to get them all in.

Oh boy. This is just not true. American’s 757s have 22 First Class seats and 166 in coach. The 767-200s that they use on this route are in a much more generous configuration so they have 10 First Class, 30 Business, and only 119 coach seats. So in fact, the 767 could have been completely full and the 757 would still end up looking relatively empty.

At this point, he delves head-on into his conspiracy theory. Though he keeps saying that he doesn’t know any of this for sure, it’s bound to stick in people’s heads.

Could the airline be presenting false information about available seats in order to get a higher price on the seats it was selling?

Huh? I don’t quite understand how that would work since most people don’t see the number of seats available anyway. So that would be a pretty strange and ineffective way to manipulate price if people don’t usually know how many seats are left.

I have seen enough flights cancelled where there were clearly not more then a dozen or two people affected by it to know that such things have been handled by airlines in similar ways before, but who knows for sure?

This is yet another common misconception. I haven’t seen an airline cancel a flight simply because it’s not full. That airplane flies a routing. If it doesn’t go, it won’t be able to make its next flight and that can impact a lot of other people. It also may need to be in maintenance that night. You just don’t mess around with schedules unless you have to.

I hope someone can look into this and I hope that American Airlines can tell us the full real story of what happened on this flight and how we all ended up in this crazy experience.

And that’s the biggest problem. It took American several days to respond, and when they did, they sent a form letter that Chris described as “quaint, but expected I guess, including this wonderful gem ‘eager to continue the beneficial relationship we have developed to date’.”

He was on Twitter blasting out 140 character missives to his 12,000 followers. He even engaged the @AAirwaves account that American uses, and they responded quickly on March 31, but then it stopped. The next public tweet on the subject came on April 2 when they said, “We’re wrkng closely w/ Customer Relations to clarify why there was an equipment change that affected your position.” Seriously? You guys couldn’t have figured it out in two full days? That’s light years in social media time.

I imagine that American swapped the plane because of a mechanical. There is no financial middle management intervention when it comes to how to handle a single airplane swap on the day of departure. That’s an operational decision, and it’s usually because there was a mechanical with the original plane. There’s no sinister plot here, but American didn’t act quickly enough with true information to counter the claim. Now this guy’s blog post is out there and his 12,000 followers on Twitter see it as well. And this isn’t an isolated case. It happens all the time and the airlines need to react more quickly.

Time is up. After receiving well over 100 entries to create a caption, I have sifted through them and chosen a winner. While the joke about “mine’s bigger than yours” is a good one, it’s just too obvious. There were definitely some real stinkers in there and some funny ones too, but in the end, there is only one winner. And you’ll see it below the picture, taking its rightful place as a caption . . .

Just don’t tell our wives we fondled a couple of models on this trip

 
So congratulations to “sam carl” for submitting the winning caption. I’ll be sending you an email today so you can take advantage of free concierge services on your next trip. Thanks to everyone for entering.

Last week, I had the chance to sit down with three of the guys behind Volaris, the successful Mexican low cost carrier that is now likely to be Southwest’s first codeshare partner. Holger Blankenstein (Chief Commercial Officer), José Luís Suárez (Director of Sales), and Manuel Ambriz López (Manager of Commercial Strategy and Schedule Planning) sat with me before meeting with some folks from the LA Business Travel Association, part of the airline’s efforts to attract more of the business community.

We talked about a wide variety of things from the airline’s decision to start serving Mexico City’s main airport and yes, the Southwest partnership. Let’s get started.

Cranky: Thanks for sitting down with me today. I’d like to start with this move into Mexico City’s Benito Juarez airport instead of just flying into Toluca as has been the case so far. Can you talk more about that?

Volaris: We actually have 3 segments. We have the leisure, corporate, and small enterprise segments. Part of leisure is the visiting friends and relatives (VFR) community. Mexico City is actually for that group. We started flying from Tijuana and it gives those friends and family another option in Mexico City.

Cranky: So Mexico City is more of a spoke and not an operational base like Toluca?
Volaris: That’s right.

Cranky: Talking about Tijuana, how much traffic do you see coming across the border from the US to fly on those Tijuana flights?
Volaris: It’s about 30%. This is a non-scientific number, it’s just from our observations at the airport, but we think it’s about 30%. Of those, 80% are from Mexican ancestry, so they’re coming to visit friends and family.

Cranky: Are you helping people get across the border?
Volaris: Yes, absolutely. We have an alliance with Greyhound and with a Mexican bus company. You can depart from the Greyhound station in downtown San Diego and go straight to the airport in Tijuana.

Cranky: I imagine people do this because of the lower fares and taxes?
Volaris: Oh yes. It’s about a $100 difference in taxes.

Cranky: I know you were at least planning Oakland to Tijuana. Are you looking to turn Tijuana into a connecting point for American flying to Mexico?
Volaris: Probably not. That’s mostly origin and destination traffic. For connections, we’ll use Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Jose to connect with Southwest for now. We are developing Guadalajara and Toluca into connecting points within Mexico. Having said that, we’ll remain a low cost airline so we won’t have a huge hub. We will create key cities with great connections, but we will still remain a low cost carrier.

Cranky: That’s a similar model to what Southwest has grown up with.
Volaris: Yes, but there is a big difference. We don’t have the ability to support those large volumes with frequent flights in Mexico. Our biggest market is Guadalajara-Tijuana with up to 8 flights a day during the peak season, but there aren’t many markets that big. We can’t have that kind of frequency elsewhere. The biggest market is Monterrey-Mexico City but there’s too much competition for us there.

Cranky: You’re based in Mexico City, right? In Santa Fe?
[Note: Santa Fe is a business district on the west side of town]
Volaris: Yeah, we actually have a virtual airport in Santa Fe. You can check your bags, get your boarding pass and then board the shuttle right there. We’ll have you on the airplane within 100 minutes.

Cranky: Is it the same on the return?
Volaris: Yes, you have to pick up your bag and then hand it right there to the shuttle driver, but that’s it. The shuttle goes every 5 minutes. Benito Juarez may be closer to Santa Fe, but sometimes the drive to Toluca can be shorter because of all the traffic. Toluca is sort of like Newark for Manhattan 20 years ago.

Cranky: Let’s talk Southwest. They’ve been in the news with this WestJet deal falling apart lately. Do you have any updates on timing?
Volaris: On WestJet? No.
Cranky: Hah, no, on your timing.
Volaris: We’re going full force ahead. We started by joining websites last year and we’ve been looking at additional areas like cargo, for example. We’re going to do something very similar to codesharing by the end of this year.

Cranky: How does that work?
Volaris: It will be seamless for the customer, but it’s not a traditional codeshare.

Cranky: Is this going to actually happen on time?
Volaris: Well, there are always unforeseen problems, but we are switching to Sabre on August 21 and Southwest still has a couple of technical issues as well.

Cranky: What are you on now?
Volaris: Navitaire.
Cranky: You might want to talk to JetBlue about that and probably not WestJet

Cranky: Are you looking at other partners?
Volaris: Sure. One of our shareholders is TACA and they just merged with AVIANCA so that’s a natural fit, but we’re really focused on the US right now. We haven’t talked about anything with TACA yet.

Cranky: Let’s talk more about the US. You recently announced service to San Jose while many other airilnes are either reducing or ending service because of how expensive the airport has become with its construction projects. Why did you go in there?
Volaris: If you look at the Bay Area, look at where the Mexican population is. There is a big chunk near Oakland, east of Oakland and a whole population south of San Jose. Places like Watsonville, Salinas, and Gilroy. So we took away one Guadalajara-Oakland flight and moved it to San Jose to have more access to communities in the south.

Our core customers are of Mexican heritage visiting friends and relatives, so this is a good place. We also hope that we can attract more business travel as well being near Silicon Valley.

Cranky: How about LAX? How have things been going?
Volaris: We’re pretty happy so far. Guadalajara is really strong and Toluca is . . . good. We’re happy.

Cranky: Do you get most of your VFR traffic from travel agents?
Volaris: No, most is online in the US and it’s growing in Mexico as well. It’s all word of mouth and targeted community involvement. We’re often at parties, fiestas, in the community but we don’t do widespread marketing.

Cranky: Do you consider Aeromexico and Mexicana to be competition? I know you look to take people off of buses.
Volaris: Well, we’re in the same industry so we do compete, but we also do our own thing. We’re a young company, we’re doing good independent things. We used to compete more with them face to face but they have changed the way they structure their network a little.

Cranky: What kind of performance information do you release publicly?
Volaris: Well, we’re private and keep things close to the vest, but we can confidently say that we’re the only Mexican airline, except possibly for one small one, that was profitable last year.

Now Departing: Delta Cuts Ties with Midwest Airlines – BNET
Midwest and Delta are no longer going to be frequent flier buddies.

Southwest Fail: Technical Delays Frustrate WestJet’s New Boss – BNET
WestJet is not happy that it’s taken Southwest so long to get its act together regarding the announced codeshare. Looks like their eyes are straying toward Delta.

Bend Not Break: Boeing 787 Passes Wing Load Test – BNET
It wasn’t as dramatic as the 777 wing snap, but the 787 passed the wing load test with flying colors.

American Airlines Seeks Air Supremacy in New York (With JetBlue’s Help) – BNET
This is my take on what American is up to in New York – a complementary piece to my JetBlue-focus here on Cranky.

United’s new Boeing 777 to have video-on-demand – Chicago Tribune
The Trib picked up on my United 777 story, and I had a couple comments to add.

Airline Baggage Fees: The Perils of Making Air Travel Suck More – BNET
Airlines that charge bag fees like to crow about the revenue bump, but they don’t talk much about the hidden costs of the policy. Oh yeah, and that whole customer dissatisfaction thing.