Larry Kellner has only been gone as head of Continental for a couple months and already new CEO Jeff Smisek is making plenty of changes. The most visible one to coach passengers is likely to be the elimination of free meals, something that was long the pride and joy of Continental. They’ve finally caved, and I imagine there will be mixed emotions on this one.

On the one hand, people always liked that Continental stood their ground and kept at least SOMETHING in the back of the bus that reminded people of the old days. Was the free meal anything special? No way. It was edible at best, though I did have a soft spot for that cheeseburger in a bag. (Do they still have that?) But even if you didn’t like it, it was comfort food, and that was nice. There was also something psychologically-appealing about them seeming to care enough for you to keep food around, even if it was crappy. It just seemed like the last vestige of civility. Former CEO Gordon Bethune summed it up well with his thoughts after 9/11.

Our reaction was to be ourselves more than we ever were. Didn’t take away the movies, didn’t take away the blankets and pillows, didn’t take off the magazines. We talked about this a lot, and I said, ‘Look, guys, if ever we were consistent and reliable, we have to be now. You have to be steady when the fucking sky is the shakiest. We’ve got to be clean, safe, and reliable, and let everybody know it. That’s all we got. That’s our edge in the business.’

Now Continental is chipping away at that as well.

But don’t worry, Continental is happy to spin this announcement so you think it’s some amazing revolution on their part. It wasn’t quite Cranky Jackass-worthy, but still kind of dumb. The release reads “Continental Airlines to Offer Food for Purchase on Select Flights” with a subhead of “Menu will include wide variety of high quality, healthy food choices.” So the spin is basically, yeah we might be getting rid of free food, but we’re replacing it with delicious, healthy, wholesome food that will make you think you’re at a five star restaurant . . . or something like that.

The way it works is this. You will now get a free meal only on flights over 6 hours in length. That’s an interesting cutoff. The 1p flight from Newark to LAX is blocked at 5h56m on Saturday and 6h6m the rest of the week. So will the folks on Saturday not get fed? And no eastbound flight from LA gets even close to 6 hours, so will that mean you only get fed westbound? Either way, only the longest domestic routes will get grub included in the price of the ticket.

I’m sure the food will be better, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t have offered both options. That’s what Hawaiian does. They offer a basic meal for free and then you can buy some really high quality stuff if you’d like to trade up. But Continental hasn’t gone that route. I figured they’d be the last to hold out, thanks to their ownership of Chelsea Food Services, the kitchen that puts these meals together. But I guess even that couldn’t sway them to keep feeding people for free.

It’s not the elimination of free meals that really bugs me but rather that Continental is now falling into the same place as everyone else. The free meal was this signal of respect, or something like that. It showed they cared just a little bit more than the rest. Not anymore.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/projector/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

If you’re one of the 5,000 Cranky subscribers out there, you probably don’t see anything different. But, if you’re one of the tens of thousands of others who come directly to the site, you’ll notice a new, cleaner look. Many will say it’s about time.

The width is a bit wider, and the header is a bit smaller. I’ve switched fonts around and made colors a bit softer. I also have some new flexibility with the sidebars that should come in handy at some point. Overall, I think it’s a good look that’s just an update on what already worked well. So why’d I change?

Well, the last version broke. Seriously. I couldn’t fix the single post pages, so I just started over with a new theme that’s been heavily modified.

The one potentially controversial move is the addition of threaded comments. Now you’ll be able to reply directly to a specific comment and have it appear directly beneath that. In fact, you can go up to 5 layers deep, so I think this will help facilitate conversation. Others may disagree.

Take a look around, press buttons, and then let me know what you like or you don’t like. If you really hate it, well, you can always become a subscriber instead.

Send the good, bad, and the broken to cf@crankyflier.com. Hope you like it.

Earlier this week, American decided to stop offering free same day standby to customers who aren’t elite members in the AAdvantage program. While I’m sure some are steaming over the move, I’m not. It actually makes sense to me. I’m just pissed that they’ve decided to treat their customers like two year olds with their incredibly stupid spin. And for that, they get the not-so-coveted Cranky Jackass award.

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.

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.

I feel like I’ve approached this topic before, but in light of the airlines raising bag fees once again to $25 for the first bag and $35 for the second, I thought it was worth revisiting. There are a lot of people complaining about bag fees going up, but that’s not going to do any good. You need to take action if you’re not happy.

It’s a time-honored tradition for travelers to hate everything that airlines do. Airline management knows that and has to take all feedback it gets as part of a larger picture. So just because you say you hate bag fees, doesn’t mean they’ll believe you. Let me explain.

People say they hate things but then they don’t change their behavior. This has happened with nearly every change that has stuck in the airline industry. People always complain, but if they keep flying, then the revenue is usually worth it in the mind of the airline manager. Airlines also tend to move in packs, so you don’t often have much time to switch your business to show your displeasure. When one moves, they all move.

But there’s a unique opportunity when it comes to bag fees because of a couple of holdouts. Southwest won’t charge you for your first two checked bags and JetBlue won’t charge you for the first. If you really aren’t happy with bag fees, you should switch your business to these guys and then write a letter to your previous favorite airline letting them know. If enough people do that, the airlines will reverse where things are going with bag fees. If not, then they’ll just keep jacking them up until they can’t anymore. It’s that simple.

Ready to change the world? This won’t be easy, because remember, elite frequent fliers don’t pay bag fees. That means that the people the airlines deem to be most important aren’t going to care if there are bag fees or not. So it’s just the unwashed masses who have to get together to fight the power. And it’s only some of the unwashed masses who check bags. Families with kids, people going on long vacations, etc – they’re the ones impacted the most. That’s an uphill battle.

So, if you want to fight the power, stop complaining and change your behavior instead. And when you do it, tell someone with specific details. You can start with the comment section on this post. Airline people read this blog, so this is one way to reach them. Or, if you’re looking for something more effective, send them an email, give them a call, or send them a postcard from the trip you take on another airline. If you don’t like bag fees, that’s the way to get them changed.

Complaining about it won’t be enough.