One thing that’s certain is that you can make statistics say pretty much whatever you want to get your point across. That’s exactly what the UNITE HERE union is doing with what appears to be a smear campaign against Lufthansa. After talking with the research analyst behind the report, I still can’t figure out why the union is bothering with this.

Earlier this week, I received an email from news@lufthansaalert.org with a report produced by the Lufthansa Traveler Alert site. That site is apparently the new campaign by the UNITE HERE union to make Lufthansa look bad. The report, titled “Customer Complaints Spike at Lufthansa, Decrease at British Airways and Air France,” was six pages of hilarity. See, the union has opted to use percentages despite the incredibly small numbers involved.

As highlighted in the email, there were four key points of the report. As I mentioned, you’ll notice that only percentages are used in all of these. That’s because the numbers are so incredibly small that it’s impossible to actually take them seriously. But when you use percentages, it looks a lot worse. Here are the four points.

Point #1 – Last year, Lufthansa’s total passenger complaints went up 70%. Meanwhile British Airways and Air France both saw decreases in total complaints.
Sounds awful, right? Well let’s use real numbers. In 2010, Lufthansa received a whopping 118 complaints via the DOT versus 68 in 2010. I did a little back of the envelope math and with around 30 flights each way per day between the US and Germany and a 75 percent load factor, Lufthansa serves around 5 million customers in the US in a year.

You think that change in the number of complaints is in any way an indication of a serious issue? I highly doubt it.

Point #2 – Lufthansa customer complaints increased in 2010 in seven of the top eight complaint categories: flight problems, baggage, rescheduling/ticketing, refunds, fares, oversales and disability access.
As you can imagine, since we’re already looking at a tiny sample size, breaking it down into categories makes it even worse. Baggage complaints were highest with 32 for the entire year. That’s up from 22. Next is a tie between Flight Problems and Reservations (not rescheduling as they suggest)/Ticketing/Boarding at 23. Everything else is single digits. Were they up? Sure. But it’s hard to consider this a trend with such a tiny sample size.

Point #3 – When 2006 data is compared with 2010 data, Lufthansa saw a 23% increase in total complaints while British Airways and Air France saw complaints drop by over 30%.
Point #4 – In each of the top four customer complaint categories – flights problems, baggage, ticketing/rescheduling/boarding, and refunds – Lufthansa trended worse than did British Airways and Air France when 2006 and 2010 data are compared.
This is rehashing the exact same thing. In 2006, Lufthansa received 87 complaints. It went down to 84 in 2007, then up to 61 and up to 68 before finally getting to 118 in 2010. What’s to say it’s not just an anomaly? The parting shot in the report tries to address that.

So far in 2011, with just January and February numbers tallied, Lufthansa has had over twice the number of total complaints filed compared to its total in Jan-Feb 2010.

Very convenient that the data was cut off in February. The March numbers have been out for well over a month and this report just came out, so March could have been included. Why wasn’t it? Well, because Lufthansa had only 8 complaints versus 21 the year before. Oops, might as well just leave out any periods that don’t help the cause, right? This is just nuts, but that brings up the biggest question.

Why the heck is the union doing this?

Normally, you would think that the union was looking to sign a better contract or get more people hired to help fix the problem, but that’s really not applicable here. UNITE HERE only represents the North American-based employees at LSG Skychefs, the catering business. So, the union has nothing to gain if Lufthansa made the strange decision to try to rectify these “problems.” None of them seem to have been about catering, so it’s not like the union can claim the airline needs to hire more of its workers to fix the problem. And even though it continues to be in ongoing negotiations with Lufthansa about a new contract, this certainly won’t impact those negotiations at all, at least not positively.

I spoke with the research analyst about the report and he really kept repeating the same two points.

1. “No comment about negotiations except that they’re ongoing.”
2. “We believe the data in the report speaks for itself.”

Unfortunately for the union, it’s the lack of data that really speaks volumes. This is just a misleading piece of propaganda that falls flat on its face.

There were a couple of completely unrelated pieces of news from Southwest that came out last week, but I decided to throw them both into a single post. First, Southwest announced that it will have a long, drawn out departure from DFW. Second, CEO Gary Kelly talked about Baltimore as an international hub. Let’s look at each of these.

Southwest to Leave DFW on November 21
This may seem like a small issue, but I find it to be truly fascinating. It’s a crazy look inside politics in the Metroplex.

Most of you probably know that Southwest’s home base is at Dallas/Love Field. When DFW opened back in the 1970s, most airlines moved to that airport, but Southwest opted for Love and there’s been a big fight ever since. It used to be that airlines could only fly from Love to other Texas points and to surrounding states. But that has slowly grown over time with Missouri as the last exemption.

This wasn’t an issue for Southwest when it was a regional player because it didn’t really care about flying beyond those points, but now it does. And over the last several years, it fought a nasty battle to repeal the restriction (called the Wright Amendment). A compromise was reached in 2006 that will see the restriction disappear in 2014 (a full 8 years after the agreement was reached). As part of that, the number of gates will be capped at 20 (something Southwest should love since it now have a virtual monopoly) and a couple other rules go into place.

There were a lot of hurt feelings in this battle, and one of the lingering rules is that for every gate that Southwest or an affiliate operates at DFW, it would have to give up one at Love. That didn’t seem like a problem when Southwest acted like, well, the way it’s always acted. But then it went and bought AirTran. AirTran flies to DFW. So now that Southwest owns AirTran, its affiliate is flying to DFW and there’s a fight about what should happen.

Southwest’s response was a pretty standard one. Tickets were sold by AirTran through November 21 before Southwest took over, so it wants to just keep flying through November 21 to avoid inconveniencing passengers. I don’t see a problem with that, though it seems like a weak excuse. I mean, how many people do you think have already bought tickets into DFW on AirTran in November, or even October? Not many. November 21 is the Monday before Thanksgiving, so you could have a few stragglers who bought an early flight out to DFW, but nobody could have bought a return from Thanksgiving. Even in that case, Southwest could put people into Love Field and even provide ground transportation if it wanted. But it’s not.

And I don’t think that’s bad, but you would think it was the worst thing to ever happened listening to some of the locals. Some have suggested that AirTran’s two gates at DFW should make Southwest surrender two at Love. Ft Worth’s mayor had previously said that Southwest should pull out far sooner. You would think that the mayor would like having those low cost flights at nearby DFW for as long as possible, but no. Apparently, he’d rather hold a grudge.

In the end, I imagine that the November 21 date will hold but this whole argument is just downright stupid, isn’t it? Local politics. Gotta love absolutely hate it.

Southwest Sees BWI as an International Gateway
Southwest made more positive news this week up in Baltimore when CEO Gary Kelly started talking about how Baltimore could be a great European gateway for the airline . . . someday. Something tells me that Gary really just got overly excited about the AirTran merger, but I fully expect that we’ll see Southwest grow internationally from Baltimore eventually.

Technically, Baltimore is already an international gateway for Southwest now that it owns AirTran. AirTran flies to Bermuda, Nassau, Cancun, and Montego Bay from the airport today, and Southwest has no plans to drop that. (How and when that can be integrated with the rest of the Southwest network is whole different clusterf*&k.) But Europe? That’s going to have to wait for a long time. There’s just too much on Southwest’s plate right now.

I, however, do bet that it’ll happen. BWI has long had European dreams and most of them have faded. Icelandair used to fly to Baltimore (and made its US-base nearby) but it pulled out years ago and now flies to Dulles instead. British Airways still maintains its single daily flight to London but only after the airport agreed to keep subsidies flowing to the airline. That’s the only flight left from Baltimore to Europe.

That’s exactly the kind of situation that Southwest could make work. People in Washington already know to go to Baltimore for cheap flights (or at least, that’s how they’ve been trained since Southwest entered BWI back in the 1990s). It’s not much of a stretch for people to also think about Baltimore as the place to go for cheap European flights.

The bigger issue is whether or not Southwest could find a way to profitably serve Europe when time and time again, long haul low cost efforts have failed. If it happens, you can bet Baltimore will be in the mix.

Delta’s recent pulldown of Transatlantic flights was fairly breathtaking in its scope, but it also showed just how joint ventures can influence decisions. Delta is increasing reliance on partners, and that’s not something it might have considered doing as much without its joint venture. Let’s take a look.

Most of the flight cuts (except for some Middle East moves that have already happened) start in September, after the summer rush. Delta had told us this would come since Transatlantic flights had seen a big increase in capacity that just wasn’t sustainable at current oil prices and off-peak demand levels. So, the cuts came and they run deep. Some, like Memphis and Seattle to Amsterdam, just see cuts in frequency. That will drop from daily to four weekly. Others will see changes in the size of the airplane used. Still others will see their summer seasonal runs clipped early (like Keflavik, Iceland which will now end in September). But there is also a list of destinations that will drop off the Delta route map, or at least lose service to one of Delta’s hubs. Over the last couple months, here’s what we’ve seen happen:

This isn’t a tiny pulldown. It’s actually pretty significant. It’s also a very interesting turn of events. I mean, this is Delta, the airline that likes to throw airplanes all over the globe even if it doesn’t seem to make a ton of sense. Granted, that’s usually because it wants to just gives things a shot to see if they work. Apparently, a lot of these routes don’t work, at least not during the lean winter.

But what is most interesting to me is how the joint venture with Air France/KLM has to have influenced this. Now, Delta can still easily serve every one of those cities via Amsterdam or Paris by connecting with its partner Air France/KLM. Sure, it could have done that before when it just had a codeshare, but that was different. Back then, it couldn’t have coordinated schedules with Air France/KLM. It couldn’t have looked at connecting flows and fares between the two airlines to come up with the best way to serve each city. Now it can, and that’s exactly what it’s doing.

The question, of course, is whether or not this is good for travelers. It certainly means less competition and fewer nonstops from the US to Europe. That seems bad. But on the other hand, these are routes that probably are losing money anyway, so they really shouldn’t be flown, at least not by this airline. It might take Delta loyalists in New York an extra stop by get to Stockholm now, but they can choose from several connecting options through multiple hubs, so there still is a significant amount of choice. Flying nonstop just isn’t one of them.

How to deal with airport strandings – CNN Out of the Office
Last week’s volcano and severe weather reminded me that it’s time to brush up on techniques for avoiding strandings.

In the Trenches: New Pricing Goes Into Effect – Intuit Small Business Blog
Just wrapping up on our new pricing finally going into effect.

It sounds like the new United is keeping First Class, but maybe only on the airplanes that already have it. Bloomberg reports that United has decided to keep First Class on some of its fleet but not all. So, is this a good move? Do they just want to avoid reconfiguring airplanes? Does it make sense? What do you think?