Hawaiian has been expanding like crazy lately with flights all over the Pacific, and we’ve had several clients fly on them. While Hawaiian has a great reputation, our clients have had a lot of problems in dealing with them. Even though the airline is growing quickly, it seems like its policies and systems might not be up to the same level of sophistication.

Issue #1 – Anti-Travel Agent Policy
The first issue is with flight bookings themselves. Hawaiian charges travel agents who book through their own reservation systems more than those who book on the website. That in itself isn’t a problem, but it means when we book people, we do it on HawaiianAir.com. We put our names in as travel arranger (there’s a spot for that), and that should let us do what we need to manage a booking.

Unfortunately, that’s not true. Even though we are the travel arranger and have all the credit card information, Hawaiian refuses to allow anyone but the credit card holder to make a change that requires payment. This leave us in the delightful spot of making our clients talk to Hawaiian for something we shouldn’t have to bother them with or paying more for the privilege of having us book in our system. Neither is a customer-friendly option.

Issue #2 – No Special Meals
Last October, a client was flying Hawaiian from Phoenix to Honolulu, spending a night there (since it wasn’t possible to connect the same day), and then going on to Sydney. These clients had paid for First Class the whole way. One of the travelers was vegan and we had entered the request in our system for a vegan meal.

On the flight to Honolulu, the flight attendants told her that Hawaiian didn’t offer special meals at all. She had a piece of fruit. Once she called from Hawai’i, I called Hawaiian to investigate. The call center agent politely informed me that Hawaiian does not offer special meals but my client was welcome to bring her own food onboard. Yes, this is what she told a paying First Class passenger. The next flight to Sydney didn’t even have fruit. With more long distance flights in Hawaiian’s network, it needs to step up.

Issue #3 – Various Tech Problems
I’m not quite sure how Hawaiian’s website works, but it doesn’t generally work very well when it comes to managing travel. On one occasion, a client had different seats showing in the manage reservation area than it showed when they checked in online. The two different systems apparently don’t talk to each other.

On another occasion, seat changes couldn’t be processed and we were told to just try again later. Instead, we called the call center to get it done. After going through several prompts asking and misunderstanding the confirmation number, we were transferred to an agent who asked for the confirmation again. She finally changed the seats for us, so we hoped. The website still showed the old seats.

Issue #4 – Seat Switcheroo
We had two different clients over the holidays who had seats reserved and then came to find that they had been replaced. In both cases, these were families traveling together with their kids put in single seats in random places. The airline refused to help them switch seats to sit with their kids even at the airport. I understand that airlines have the right to switch seats, but there didn’t seem to be any good reason for it here. (There was no aircraft type change and it wasn’t a 767 which has different configurations.) There was no notification either. They just found themselves in trouble when they tried to check in.

Issue #5 – Last Minute Schedule Changes
You would think that holiday travel schedules would be locked in fairly early. People book their Hawai’i holiday flights very early on. But Hawaiian made some schedule changes within a couple months of travel during this time. Even worse, they made the change and didn’t send an email out about it for long after we found out. How do I know? Our client had already had so many problems that they kept checking the reservations on the website religiously.

The schedule changes were caught long before Hawaiian bothered notify anyone and the auto-re-accommodation wasn’t very good. This meant spending a lot of time on the phone with the call center hoping to improve the situation. And when Hawaiian did notify of the changes, they just sent a generic link to the flights without showing the change itself. We had to pull up previous notifications to find out what the changes actually were.

Issue #6 – Not Playing Fair
I saved the best for last. I couldn’t quite believe that any airline would try to play this the way Hawaiian did. One client was booked with a completely legal 55 minute layover in Maui going from Kona to San Jose. Someone who said they were from Hawaiian called us since we were the travel arranger and said that they wanted to do a favor for our client. Since they “only” had 55 minutes, they wanted to move them to an earlier flight from Kona so that they would have more time to connect. Oh, and they were being so kind to offer that without any additional charge.

A quick check of availability showed what was up. The flight they were on was completely full, oversold I’m guessing. The earlier flight had plenty of seats to sell. So Hawaiian was trying to move people to an earlier flight so that nobody had to be bumped. That’s perfectly fine to be proactive like that – in fact, I like it. But if you’re going to do that, don’t pretend you’re doing someone a favor as a way to weasel out of offering compensation.

I honestly thought it was a joke call at first after listening to the message. The person on the phone had a conversation with someone else in the background asking which number we should call back on because they didn’t know. Eventually they gave us a local 808 phone number and asked us to call back and ask for a specific person. We did call back and the agent told us that it was ok if they stayed on their original flights. Gee, thanks. (And yes, they made their connection without any trouble.)

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Have any of you flown Hawaiian lately? Had any of these kinds of problems?

Hawaiian announced it was going to put some more Hawaiian in its service this week with what’s being called Mea Ho’okipa Service. You can read through what’s changing, but I was particularly caught by the Ho’okipa Desk, where passengers can pre-order meals and entertainment options in the departure lounge. (This is everywhere in North America except at JFK where JetBlue handles the airline.) What do you think? Will this help Hawaiian grow its business?

I realize that Hawai’i is so far west that it’s off the radar of much of the country, but it’s always top of mind for me. Having vacationed there often as a kid (and going back for the first time in seven years this September), I’ve always paid close attention. Over the last decade, it’s been an incredibly exciting place to watch.

Think about what the market was like ten years ago. Hawaiian and Aloha were the two big interisland carriers, as had been the case for decades. Aloha had just started flying to the mainland. Hawaiian had recently replaced its DC-10s with 767s but still mainly flew the big airplanes to large cities on the West Coast. The big legacy carriers had their usual service to Hawai’i, much of it focused on Honolulu. Low cost ATA also had a fair bit of service in the market as did the odd charter carrier.

Since that time, the market has been turned on its head. In the interisland market, Aloha went under and Mesa used shady tactics to take its place with go! in the interisland market. Others tried to grow and then retrenched (Island Air). Still others (Mokulele and go!) partnered, and then broke up.

To the mainland, things changed even more quickly. With Aloha and then ATA gone, there was a big opening in Hawai’i. Alaska Airlines filled it and now has a ton of service in the market. More and more service shifted to the outer islands to the point that it’s fairly rare to find a widebody to Hawai’i at all, unless you’re on Hawaiian.

Hawaiian has seen the most remarkable change of all. In the interisland market, it is now the undisputed king. go! is just a minor annoyance. Now, it is looking to cement its place even further by expanding back into a market it served years ago with Dash-7 turboprops. Buried in a recent release about interisland fare changes, Hawaiian noted that it has “signed a Letter of Intent to acquire turbo-prop aircraft with the aim of establishing a subsidiary carrier to serve routes not currently in Hawaiian’s neighbor island system.”

The market to places like Lanai and Molokai along with smaller cities on the bigger islands has been dominated by the likes of Island Air (with whom Hawaiian currently codeshares) and smaller players like Mokulele and Pacific Wings. Now Hawaiian wants a piece of that too.

But the most remarkable change has been in the long haul route network. Hawaiian’s operation to big west coast cities remains, but it has been surrounded by other opportunities. Hawaiian started pushing into other cities like San Jose and Sacramento. But it also looked elsewhere in the world.

With its recent announcement of service to Auckland, Hawaiian has continued to grow the Pacific Rim. Other than Sydney next door, there’s now also Manila, Tokyo, Sapporo, Osaka, Fukuoka, and Seoul. Many of those North Asian cities are really made possible by the introduction of the A330, an airplane with longer range to help Hawaiian grow into these lucrative new markets.

But it’s not just about growth around the Pacific Rim. Hawaiian is also experimenting beyond the Western US and has pushed into New York. That might sound like a gamble since New Yorkers more frequently fly down to the much-closer Florida and Caribbean markets, but Hawaiian thinks it can make a go of it. It’s being smart about it and flies into JetBlue’s Terminal 5. It has also put together a partnership with JetBlue to feed its flight from around the Northeast.

The result is a dramatically different airline than what we saw just a decade ago. Will this all work? Maybe not. But it doesn’t have to as long as some of it does. There’s nothing wrong with trial and error, and this is an airline that seems to be willing to take some chances. I’d love to get into greater detail with them about their strategy, but I’m afraid I have never received a response from the PR folks over there so I stopped trying. But it’s still a lot of fun to watch from afar.

Hawaiian isn’t the only story in Hawai’i these days. Island Air has just announced big changes itself. I’m hoping to speak to the CEO over there sometime soon to get more detail about plans to compete in this fast-moving market. And the market isn’t done shifting.

Southwest has said it will fly to Hawai’i one of these days. Rumors have swirled about Virgin America working on it as well. And then of course, there’s Allegiant, which is finally starting up from small cities to Honolulu. I can’t even imagine what it’s going to look like in another decade.

Hawaiian Airlines to Fly Direct to New Zealand – Fodor’s
I’m doing a little experiment writing some newsy columns for Fodor’s. This is the first one I’ve done. No opinion in these, just news. Let’s see what you think.

Questions linger in Delta’s purchase of Trainer refinery – Philadelphia Inquirer
A good in-depth piece about Delta’s refinery purchase. I was asked to comment and ended up literally with the last word.

Is Spirit Taking Over the Low-Cost Airfare Market? – Conde Nast Daily Traveler
Spirit has been expanding like crazy lately. Is it going to stick?

In the Trenches: Failed Revenue Streams – Intuit Small Business Blog
This week I talk a little more about my credit card revenue efforts.

Travelers Are Rightly Frustrated – New York Times – Room for Debate
I can’t say I like the title, but the NYT asked me to write up a piece on fees to go with three others so it can be debated. The title should say . . . but not with the airlines.

One of the more interesting panels in Phoenix last week was the one that focused on fleet strategy. There’s always a ton of discussion about buying airplanes, and each airline has a different philosophy. On the panel, there were representatives from Air China, Delta, Hawaiian, and Southwest from the airline side. The CEO of Airbus Americas Barry Eccleston was also there.

Today, I want to focus on the the three US airlines there and their different strategies. It’s interesting that all may include the Boeing 717 in one way or another.

Delta the Opportunist
I was most interested in hearing from Delta’s VP of Fleet Strategy and Transactions Nathaniel Pieper. You might remember my post addressing why Delta had bought current generation 737-900ERs instead of waiting for next generation airplanes. Certainly Delta’s fleet strategy has differed from other legacy airlines.

I was particularly interested in the rumor broken by Holly Hegeman at PlaneBusiness that Delta would be acquiring the AirTran 717 fleet from Southwest. We didn’t get any details on that in this panel, but after hearing Nathaniel speak, it seems clear to me that the 717 would work quite nicely for Delta considering its strategy.

Nathaniel described Delta’s fleet strategy as one of opportunism. “We have every fleet type known to man.” That’s because Delta will go into the secondary market and buy airplanes if it makes sense. The MD-90 is a perfect example of that. Delta has been acquiring every MD-90 that’s on the market because they’re cheap to acquire and they’re good airplanes that can fly many of Delta’s medium haul missions.

Nathaniel wasn’t afraid to judge others, noting that you “won’t see us enter into a commitment for 460 firm aircraft with 500 options. We’d rather play the game a bit more conservatively, be in the game a bit more frequently and take smaller bites instead of one big chunk.” Hmm, I wonder why he picked that “460″ number. Oh right, that coincidentally matches a certain recent order from American. Heh.

What about airplanes even smaller than the 717? The news is not good. To the surprise of nobody, Nathaniel explained that the “economics of the [50 seat RJ] is very challenging right now.” As if that wasn’t clear enough, he confirmed that Delta would like to shrink that fleet “substantially lower.” What would replace those airplanes? Either fewer flights on bigger jets or some markets might lose service all together.

Hawaiian Loves Its Fleet
Moving over to airlines that actually operate the 717 today, how does Hawaiian feel about the airplane? Peter Ingram, EVP and Chief Commercial Officer for the airline has nothing but love. “For the unique flying we do of 100 to 200 mile hops in the islands, the 717 is very good…. We like the 717 fleet and expect to be in it for this decade at least.”

The more interesting fleet for Hawaiian is that of the bigger jets. In the last two decades, Hawaiian has gone from the L1011 to the DC-10, then to the 767 and now to the A330-200. Why the A330? The airplane apparently has “great economics” to the west coast while at the same time giving more range to reach more places in Asia. Since that’s where Hawaiian has been expanding, this makes a great deal of sense.

Southwest, the Simple Airline
Let’s go from an airline that loves its 717s to one that wants to see them gone yesterday. Did Southwest tip its hat about the fate of the 717 at the airline? No, but the way Brian Hirsham, SVP of Technical Operations spoke, it sounded like the writing is on the wall to me.

Brian explained that the Southwest fleet strategy has two parts. The first part is simplicity. “We realize tremendous synergies by operating a simple fleet.” The 717 hurts that simplicity argument, of course.

The second piece? Flexibility. “We have the ability to flex up and down in terms of fleet size.” Southwest will be retiring 120 737-300/500 “classic” aircraft over the next couple years and replacing them with current generation 737-700/800 instead. But if demand rises, Southwest can simply keep those classic 737s flying longer. And yes, that could happen if, say, Southwest decided to drop an entire fleet type.

In the end, everyone seemed pretty confident with their strategies, and that’s no surprise. A good fleet strategy is key to running an airline. Sometimes, what works for one airline might not for another. And that’s why I’m keeping a close eye on those AirTran 717s…

[Photo via Flickr user redlegsfan21/CCSA 2.0]