3 Links I Love: Southwest’s 2021 Plan, Wizz Goes For the Kill, United Jumps on a Bandwagon

American, Links I Love, Southwest, United, Wizz

This week’s featured link

Gary Kelly Outlines Plans to Avoid Layoffs and Furloughs Through 2021Southwest Media
I thought this 10 minute video from Southwest CEO Gary Kelly was really well done. Sure, it’s good news that they are avoiding furloughs, but there are pay cuts that accompany those, so it’s still a somber message for an airline that has never reached this point before. At the same time, Gary had to thread the needle and tell everyone that this only counts if there’s an agreement between the unions and management. Otherwise, furloughs may still happen. He set a date for a deal to be done (year-end) and laid it out pretty clearly. Now we wait and see what happens. At least one union is already balking, but that could just be bluster.

Chart of the Week: I was curious about Florida, so I pulled some data. Here is the year-over-year change in seats on continental US domestic routes. The red line is everything except Florida. The, ahem, pastels, are routes that touch Florida. You can see it didn’t really diverge until May, but then things settled back, and now it’s off to the races again. (Data via Cirium)

Two for the road

Wizz Air announces new Oslo base and DOMESTIC Norway routesanna.aero
You have to love just how predatory Wizz is. It has a good balance sheet, solid cost structure, and it is positioning itself to absolutely win when the pandemic is over. Norwegian is clearly one of the weaker airlines that it is interested in knocking out. Now it just needs to promise to hire those Norwegian employees that lose their jobs if the government will stop propping up the airline.

Peerspace Teams with United to Bundle Flights with Work and Meeting Spaces for Remotely-Distributed CompaniesUnited Hub
I’ll give United points for creativity here. I have no idea who if anyone will actually care about bundling flights with meeting rentals for remote teams, but why not? More companies are going that way, and they may consider something like this if they don’t have the staff to easily coordinate. Or maybe they won’t.

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1 comment on “3 Links I Love: Southwest’s 2021 Plan, Wizz Goes For the Kill, United Jumps on a Bandwagon

  1. Florida is getting a bad wrap. Covid is only really bad down in SoFl (Miami)- even the Google *unofficial* covid stats show it. But tourist are still avoiding the rest of the state, which is sad.

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