What did the airline do that was so deserving of this award? Take a look at the homepage of its now-defunct KentuckySkies operation. I should say, the former homepage because it was already changed last night.

That’s right. The page title is Skip Kentucky followed by a simple yet not-so-elegant message beneath. What the heck did Kentucky do to deserve this kind of treatment? Well, it’s a long sordid story.

Pacific Wings flies under its own name in Hawai’i, but it has tried to grow its business on the mainland by going after small Essential Air Service routes. When it gets some, it uses a different marketing name in each area. There’s New Mexico Airlines in, well, New Mexico and GeorgiaSkies in… wanna guess? KentuckySkies was created to fly from Owensboro to Nashville and it was closely tied with TennesseeSkies which went from Jackson (TN) to Nashville. Both of these names are now gone, though the TennesseeSkies homepage still lives.

What happened? According to Pacific Wings in its filing with the federal government, the airline was “unable to procure counter or gate space at [Nashville International Airport] on reasonable terms.” Ah yes, congested Nashville Airport – a very difficult place to find space to operate. Hah.

Not quite. My guess is that it’s all about the price of that space. Pacific Wings didn’t like the deal it could get at Nashville so it opted to just back out of offering the service entirely. Not sure why this happened after it had already commenced service. You would think it would have had that figured out before it even applied. Fear not for the people of Owensboro and Jackson; Cape Air picked up the former operation and SeaPort the latter.

Now, if it was just an issue with the gate space in Nashville, wouldn’t the airline tell you to skip Tennessee, not Kentucky? Clearly there’s a lot of bad blood here that hasn’t quite boiled to the surface yet. This actually isn’t the first time Pacific Wings has been in an interesting altercation of sorts. Remember this piece I wrote back in 2009 about a physical fight in Hawai’i?

Look, I’m not here to take sides, because I don’t really know the story. But I can tell you that putting this kind of message up is just dumb. Pacific Wings still wants to bid for Essential Air Service routes. Does the airline think that communities are going to be receptive to these kind of shenanigans? I think not. It’s even worse to double down, but that’s exactly what Pacific Wings did. It changed the website to this last night.

Oh please. Ridiculous. This isn’t going to win the airline any friends.

The union is using one of oldest tricks in the book: going after my credibility to muddy the water. This is just dumb. They really shouldn’t want to bring more attention to a flawed report like this. Now I’ve just dug in deeper and found even more problems with it. While I was waffling before, now I’m not. UNITE HERE has truly earned the Cranky Jackass Award.

You can read the union’s entire response here (pdf) if you’d like, but I’ll pull out the most fun parts. Let’s start with the opening.

One of the things I appreciate about your site is you are very open about your relationship to companies in the airline industry. And just one month after Lufthansa gave you a free round-trip, business class ride on its A380 from San Francisco to Frankfurt, perhaps I should not be surprised at your dismissive response to my report.

Ah yes, the back-handed compliment. A time-honored tradition that’s used to cover bad work. If someone calls out real issues, just call his or her credibility into question but look completely pleasant while doing so. This takes the focus off your bad analysis and tries to shift the issue. (Sounds like the author may have a future in politics.) It’s true, I’m very open about these things, and I did just fly Lufthansa at the airline’s expense. That doesn’t mean I won’t gladly rip Lufthansa a new one if it’s deserved. The problem here for the union is that it’s not.

You can read the rest of the response yourself if you’re interested in more sugar-coated insults, but let’s focus on the weak defense of the report itself and break that down.

The Department of Transportation data in the report is real, and to my knowledge is the only reliable U.S. source of compiled complaint information on international
airlines. If the DOT is willing to use these numbers to “to determine the extent to which carriers are in compliance with federal aviation consumer protection regulations,” then they’re good enough for me. Even if I am just a research analyst at a union.

*sigh* The issue is not whether this is the only place to get complaint data or not but whether or not it’s statistically valid and can be used to explain a trend or not. In this case, the year-over-year change in complaints from 2009 to 2010 moved by roughly less than one-thousandth of one percent over total passengers carried by Lufthansa to and from the US (using my rough passenger estimate). Even the initial number itself is so tiny that it’s not significantly different from zero. So regardless of what the purpose of the complaint reports are in the eyes of the DOT, that doesn’t magically mean that we can consider each number valid for any kind of analysis.

You’re right, I could have used the raw numbers, but I sort of agree with you that the raw numbers themselves aren’t incredibly exciting on their own. They’re small
because, well, how many people actually go through the effort to submit their airline complaints to the U.S. government? (If you care about an answer, you can look at the DOT analysis for the new passenger rights rule, where the DOT uses the ratio that every 1 complaint submitted to the DOT represents about 61 complaints submitted to the foreign airlines.

Excellent. Let’s just forget about using raw numbers because they aren’t “exciting.” I see. So we’re not looking for statistical validity here. We’re looking for excitement. You can apply any ratio you want to these numbers, but that still doesn’t make the small change valid. And this ratio is just an estimate by the DOT anyway, so using it would make a statistically insignificant change even less valid, if that’s possible.

The result of that comparison was clear. Lufthansa complaints went up, Air France and British Airways complaints went down. Is the sample number of complaints
small? Yes. But if the increases were random, would Lufthansa have seen them in 7 out of 8 top categories from 2009 to 2010? If they were random, wouldn’t Air France and British Airways have seen more fluctuation too?

This is my favorite part. I hadn’t even touched the Air France and British Airways numbers in my initial post, so I should thank the union for giving me even more firepower to show how awful the analysis is. The result is far from “clear” as proposed.

When I spoke with the research analyst, he told me that he didn’t bother looking at the monthly complaint reports. He just looked at the year-end summary and called it a day. That makes the analysis even worse because it doesn’t look for outliers. And that’s exactly why BA’s numbers are so different. In 2009, BA saw 347 complaints while dropping to a mere 120 in 2010. That’s great improvement, right? Wrong.

A look at the monthly data shows that in October 2009, BA received an incredible 244 complaints for reservations/ticketing/boarding. Why? According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, “The increase in the number of October complaints is attributed primarily to British Airways’ erroneous offer of $40 fares between the United States and India.” That’s an outlier and can’t be used to judge overall performance for an entire year. Guess what happens if we just substitute a more typical monthly result that month? We see an increase in complaints year-over-year approaching 20 percent. Fun with numbers, right? (Not that this is a significant change either.)

I highly recommend reading the entire response. In particular, I like the union’s effort to call into question the safety of the engines on the A380. Enjoy.

How awesome is that?! I almost gave the award to the union in yesterday’s post, but I think I really need to keep it for something special. After all, it’s now been elevated in stature with this rendering. Let’s see who does something deserving next.

Thanks, Johosofat!

The press release announcing the change was entitled, “American Airlines Streamlines its Airport Processes.” Usually a vague message like that means they threw a bunch of stuff into one release, hiding the bad news at the bottom. I think that’s what they teach in the College of Spin. If there was such a place, it would undoubtedly be located in a beautiful mountainous environment with grand vistas of panoramic wintry wonders (Siberia). But that’s not what happened here.

The entire release was focused solely on the fact that you can no longer standby for earlier flights on the day of travel unless you’re an elite member. You now have to pay $50 for a confirmed seat, if it’s available. Taking away this option does, in fact, “streamline” airport processes, but does the customer care about that? No. They care about the changing benefits, and they’re not going to be fooled by that headline. Gimme a friggin’ break. Do I look that stupid to you?

Wait, don’t answer that. That wasn’t one of my finer moments.

But here’s the point. I completely understand why you’re doing this. I’m sure too many people were taking advantage of the same day standby option to avoid paying higher fares. Sure, you book the 6p flight and standby for the early morning flight. Or you book the redeye and fly during the day. That’s money out of your pocket and into the pocket of the consumer. I may not like it, as a non-elite flier, but I get it.

So don’t feed me a line of crap about how American is doing this “as part of its efforts to streamline processes and the customer experience during flight departure. . . . ” Clearly that’s a benefit to you as well, but I don’t care what the benefit is to you. I care what the impact is for me. Please stop treating me like a child and tell me why you’re doing this. I want to see this headline:

“American Airlines Starts Charging for Same Day Standby Because You Bastards Won’t Pay Enough for a Ticket”

Now that would be refreshing.

The Cardinal’s post was prompted by the AEA’s efforts to lobby the EU to get more access to credit for its member airlines to renew their fleets. The problem here, of course, is that if the airlines are too weak to have access to credit on their own, then they should simply have to wait to renew their fleets until they can afford it. He also criticized the AEA’s support of suspending slot rules at constrained airports so that legacy carriers could sit on their slots even if they weren’t using them. These are just a couple examples of the longstanding pattern for Europeans to want to prop up their failing carriers. Yes, I’m looking at you, Alitalia.

Apparently, the AEA didn’t like this post and they made that clear in a comment on the blog. Unfortunately, they also feel they’re so superior that they can’t be bothered to explain their position. I’m republishing their comment here:

Here in the AEA offices we fell off our seats laughing. EU institutions give preferential treatment to the AEA carriers? We wish. I’m afraid your correspondent’s insights into the European scene don’t go very deep.

We could explain, in nice easy-to-understand terms, why schedule continuity and predictability across successive timetable seasons is a Good Thing, but we can’t be bothered. If The Cardinal can’t work that out for himself, there’s not much point.

Anyway, thanks for the publicity. It’s nice to know that someone on the other side of the world has such a high opinion of our lobbying prowess. Keep believing.

It’s that second paragraph that gets me. I don’t think anyone would argue that schedule continuity and predictability are welcomed by travelers, but if legacy airlines can’t maintain that schedule continuity by actually operating their flights, then it seems quite clear to me that other carriers should be given the opportunity to use those slots if they have better uses for them.

Of course, the AEA doesn’t think it’s even worth explaining this to my readers, and for that, they should be ashamed. Do you think that blog readers are so stupid that they aren’t worth your time? You are sadly mistaken, if that’s the case, and it makes you look as out of touch as your efforts would imply. Yes, AEA, that is why you have earned the Cranky Jackass award.

I asked the Cardinal if he would like to comment, and sure enough, he did.

So AEA didn’t lobby for slot waivers and when the EU none-the-less offered them to the AEA (out of the goodness of its heart) the AEA didn’t actually accept the waivers?”

As we said, the EU has, in general, done a good job of being even-handed between LCCs and the AEA, but this is one instance in which they clearly erred on the side of the AEA. There are rules, the rules shouldn’t be waived just because AEA carriers haven’t done as good a job of keeping their financial noses clean as Ryanair, EasyJet, et al.

Amen. Maybe the AEA will actually be willing to respond to this one. If so, AEA, I’ve got a guest post with your name on it. Disagreements are always welcome here, but refusing to even enter the conversation makes you seem elitist and out of touch. Care to change that perception?

Effective Sept. 2

North America United Economy® (UE) -All Markets

• Expanding a la carte snacks for purchase to flights between 760 -1149 miles (approximately 2-3 hours in duration) as a result of successful testing in select markets. Along with the expansion, we’re removing complimentary biscoff and pretzels as data from those tests confirmed that the a
  la carte offering appeals to our customers and they are willing to pay for snacks of higher value.
• Continuing test of a fresh Buy on Board offering along with the current snack box on flights between 1440 – 2099 miles (approximately 3.5 – 5 hours in duration). Testing limited to ORD-LAX-ORD and DEN-IAD-DEN.

That’s right. No more snacks onboard medium-range flights. But believe me, this is nothing compared the rest of the things here. In fact, this one didn’t even make me blink.

Effective Oct. 1

Increasing Buy on Board Prices

• Shelf-stable items increase from $5 to $6.
• Fresh items increase from $7 to $9.

That’s one way to raise cash. Just raise your prices. These aren’t exactly competitive (Delta will still give you a turkey sandwich for $7), but nobody is going to compare meal prices when they choose their airline. They really are trying to ease us into the worst stuff, aren’t they? Let’s move on.

Offering Two-Class Service on North America Three-Class Airplanes

• United First® service remains the same.
• A combined BOB service will be offered in United Business® (UB) and United Economy® (UE).
• Customers in UB will receive complimentary beverages and BOB offering.
• Staffing will be adjusted to FAA minimums.

Ok, this is insane. On some flights between hubs, United offers service on its internationally-configured aircraft. That means that instead of the usual mediocre domestic first class seat, you get a nice international product in first and business. Now, they’re giving up on business class on those aircraft by making the seat the only differentiator between coach and business. Oh and you’ll get the food and drink for free in business, but it’s the same stuff you can buy in the back of the bus. Staffing will be reduced to FAA minimums meaning that you’ll have about the same level of service as you get in coach (down 1 or 2 flight attendants on each flight).

I understand that this will save the airline a minuscule $2 million a year. That is a drop in the bucket in terms of the bottom line, but it’ll certainly anger people who end up in that “premium” cabin on domestic flights. If they really wanted to simplify things, they should sell the business seats as coach and upgrade their best fliers. It could be sort of an Economy Plus Plus. At least then they’d be underpromising and overdelivering, but no. They’re being greedy here and it’s going to backfire.

Buy on Board Offered Out of IAD to Europe (except KWI)

• Replacing complimentary meals in UE with BOB fresh and snack box offerings.

Had I seen this one from US Airways, I wouldn’t have even blinked. It’s consistent with what they’re trying to be. I know that United sent out surveys asking about people’s thoughts on this, but I guarantee you that they’ve tossed out the undoubtedly negative results of that survey and decided to go with this anyway. It’s just incredible to me. And yes, I’ve confirmed with United spokesperson Robin Urbanski that elites are not exempt. They will have to buy meals just like everyone else if they’re in coach.

Eliminate Second Service in p.s. Market

• Removing the pre-arrival snack service and replacing with a beverage service in response to flight attendant and customer feedback.

Now when you fly p.s. between LA or San Francisco and New York/JFK in business and first, you’ll get your first meal but you won’t get a second service. (Meals in the small Economy Plus section were eliminated awhile ago.) I’d like to see the customer feedback that says that people don’t want a snack; they’d rather just have a beverage. Please. Don’t try and hide behind that one as your rationale.

So there you have it. The death by a thousand cuts strategy continues. Like I said, if I saw this from US Airways, I wouldn’t blink. (They’ll probably match.) But this is United. This is the airline that just released those ridiculous animated commercials that tried to set the mood for a premium, luxurious experience when you fly. That is NOT the airline that is actually being presented to the flying public. This is an airline that appears to have early stage dementia and can’t quite remember what it’s supposed to be doing half the time. Somewhere an Indian is crying. (He’ll probably tell you through his thick Indian accent that his name is Bob Smith and he works in a United reservations center, but that’s not important right now.)

If you want to make it clear to United that you want a better, more consistent experience that actually lives up to (or, *gasp* exceeds) your expectations, you need to switch your spending and actually fly on an airline (like the soon-to-be Star Alliance member Continental) that can deliver. So far, United has proven that it can’t do it, over and over again. Just remember, words won’t change a thing here. Shifting your business elsewhere will.

Last December, Howard Kronberg was a passenger on a flight about to touch down at the airport in Newark, New Jersey when he feared his life was over. “It’s a catastrophic accident waiting to happen.”

Oh good, so a passenger with no flying experience knows that it’s a horribly unsafe maneuver? Please. As tempting as it may be, I can’t say I fault this guy for thinking that. A go-around can be a scary thing if you don’t know what’s happening. So who can I fault? The AP for putting this garbage on the air.

Go-arounds are a normal part of flying. If there’s any question that landing on a runway would be unsafe, then the best possible move is to go around and try again. This can happen because another plane doesn’t clear the runway fast enough, the plane comes in too fast or too high, or maybe the weather is too bad at the moment. In these cases, it’s a safer move to go around than to try to get on the ground.

I find it incredible that the report states that some controllers say that going around makes a mid-air collision more likely, yet there’s no source on that at all. In fact, the only controller they interview says it’s “the safe route out.”

I’ve been through more than one go-around in my life, and I’ll admit that it can be a little tense since you don’t know why it’s happening. But just remember, pilots don’t want to go around either. The sooner they land, the sooner they can go home (or to the hotel). So if you’re going around, there’s a good reason for it, and your pilot is keeping you safe.

Pieces like these hold absolutely no value other than to scare people with something that isn’t unsafe. I wish there was some stronger oversight at the AP, because this report never should have seen the light of day.

Now, last time Southwest had a sex scandal, they ignored it and it blew up to epic proportions. The girl with the short skirt, Kyla Whats-Her-Face, even got herself invited to a Richard Branson party for Virgin America. When they finally did respond, it was a day late and a dollar short. The damage had been done. So you knew Southwest wouldn’t make that mistake again, and it was exactly their response this time that even made me consider writing about this event.

First, they put out a press release with all the facts from the point of view of the crew members involved as well as uninvolved passengers on the flight. Also, I received a quick response from Southwest spokesperson Paula Berg when I asked for more details. She immediately pointed me to an updated story from the same person who filed the original report. This one presented Southwest’s side of the story.

As you might imagine, they have a very different interpretation of events, and one that I find to be far more believable. They say the girls (or at least one of them) got angry that someone was in the bathroom so long. They pounded on the door, and when asked to stop acting that way, they refused. When the person came out, words were exchanged, at the very least. Once they landed, they took them off the plane and canceled the return on their tickets, giving them a refund for that fare. Oh, and Paula added, “the two ladies are not ‘banned’ from ever traveling on Southwest in the future.” Sounds a lot more plausible to me.

But what’s really interesting here is that they fought the YouTube video with a response video of their own from spokesperson Brandy King.

She may very well be a good spokesperson behind the camera, but she didn’t come off very well in front of it. The content was fine, but she fumbled and stumbled her way through the minute-long video. I still like the proactive effort, but really, the entire time I was watching this video, I kept thinking two things.

1. Nice strategic placement in front of the picture that says “A beautiful way to fly.” Hah.
2. If Southwest decided to ban pretty people from flying, Brandy King wouldn’t be able to fly her own airline

Despite the fumbling in the video, I think this was handled pretty well by Southwest. It’s nice to see them learn from their past mistakes. A look at the 900+ comments on that news story shows that most people side with the airline on this one (but definitely not all). My favorite comment? “I didn’t know Paris and Nicole were still friends?!!”

I clicked through to US Airways and the price didn’t show up as $117 but rather $122.30, as you can see here:

I started trying to figure out what was going on, so I looked around at a bunch of other sites. You can see I’ve cobbled together the prices from the OTAs below:

They’re all also $122.30 except for Orbitz with its penny rounding error and Priceline with its $117.30 price. So while Orbitz, Travelocity, and Expedia add their $5 service fee, US Airways has quietly decided to do the same for bookings on their own site. What’s even more shady about this entire thing is that US Airways has buried it into the base fare so you would never know that you were paying $5 more than the base price. And since Priceline no longer has booking fees, you can actually get the flight for less money by booking on Priceline.

Now my curiosity got the better of me, so I called up reservations to see what they’d say. They told me that fare would be $122.65 plus a $10 reservation fee. I have no idea how they ended up being $.35 more than anywhere else, but it’s clear the $5 fee applies to phone reservations as well. And that’s on top of the $10 fee they already charge. At this point I decided to see if I could get to the bottom of this, so I opened up the KVS Availability Tool and looked at the surcharge fare rules in the SABRE system. Unfortunately, this is what it gave me:

Though this won’t show me the surcharge, I have to think there is one in there or it wouldn’t be hidden from agency view.

This makes absolutely no sense to me on so many levels. First of all, all US airlines, including US Airways, have spent years trying to convince customers that the best place to go to find the cheapest fare is their own websites. It was an unwritten agreement between airline and customer that you could go to the website and not find it cheaper anywhere else except for possibly from the stray consolidator or when packaged with hotels and car rentals. Now, US Airways has decided to chuck that right out the window. The years and money they’ve spent on building up that reputation have been flushed right down the toilet. And the fact that they try to hide it in the base fare so the customer can’t see it makes it even worse.

What does this mean to me? Well, if I do fly US Airways (and this does make me slightly less likely to do so), I’ll book at Priceline. There’s no reason to spend more money to buy on the US website if I can get it cheaper elsewhere.

Did they really think people wouldn’t find out about this? Did they think they could charge more and nobody would change their behavior? I asked my PR contact at the airline and he wasn’t aware that this was happening he said “the $5 increase you’re seeing is essentially a fare increase to fares booked at usairways.com.” (updated 12/11 @ 1002p)

I’m sure they’ve done the calculations. They’re smart people. The bet is that they can make more money with that $5 hidden surcharge than they’ll lose from people ditching the airline, migrating to Priceline for cheaper fares, or booking via other OTAs for more amenities and better service. Sadly, that bet is probably right in the short term and potentially right even in the long term but that’s harder to predict. That’s why if they had done this so that people could clearly see the fee, it might be hard for me to argue even though I don’t agree with the decision. But the sneaky nature of this just leaves me feeling cheated.

What does this mean for the OTAs? Will Priceline re-institute a booking fee or will they continue to have a price advantage? If I were Priceline, I’d keep the advantage and enjoy the influx of people who will book on the site. But you have to think that US Airways will pressure them to add a fee again. If not, lower back-end commissions may be in their future. (I’m assuming they still get some.) For all the other OTAs, well, things just got interesting. Many of them offer customer service above and beyond what customers get through the airline, so if the price is the same, why not get more for your money by booking through OTAs?

And what about the metasearch guys? After I found that issue on Farecast, I looked at Kayak and Sidestep as well, but USAirways.com didn’t even show up as a seller. Maybe US Airways will plan on backing away from all metasearch guys now that they won’t look as competitive as they did before. If not, metasearch sites like Farecast will have to adjust their USAirways.com fares by $5 to be accurate.

Wow. This one is just incredible.