Interesting perspective from a consumer. But you should be used to that in just about everything you buy. If one airline services a particular route, of course they are going to charge more for it. If they have competition on the route, especially competition like WN, they must lower their prices in order to compete. The airline couldn't possibly afford to offer GoFares to every route they fly, so they are just concentrating on those where they are competing. Just like when there's only one gas station in town, of course you're going to pay more.
I am not used to it in everything I buy.
If I need razor blades or shaving cream or toothpaste or a pair of wrangler jeans or guinea pig food, I can go down to WalMart and buy them...regardless of whether WalMart has a million and 1 competitors in my town or whether or not WalMart has already run all of the moms and pops out of business. They maintain reasonable prices throughout all of their stores.
If I need gasoline and I am in between El Paso & Dallas you can bet I am going to fill my tank when I leave and plan for my stops so I don't have to buy gasoline in some of the little bitty out of the way fly-specked towns where it might be $2.20 a gallon. I'll fill up before I leave and drive thru to Big Spring where it is $1.70.
Perhaps that is one of the reasons they have been successful.
I can hop on Southwest at any time and to any place with a reasonable degree of certainty I am not being price gouged. They have no competition (ie, it is a monopoly market) from OKC to MCI. 350 miles, give or take. What would USAirways charge me for a walk up fare in a totally monopoly market? Southwest would charge me....$94.
And that's USAirways' dilemma. Folks have been greedy and management has fed at the trough for way too long. Gouging passengers for every cent you can is never a good way to do business......maybe especially when you can. Do you think for an instant that the guy who buys plane tickets doesn't remember being bled for every cent....when the airline could do it (and did)?
Saying "we're going to adopt more GoFares when we can" is very much like a country that has just had a military dictatorship take over --- "we will have free elections when the people are ready"...it never happens.
If you peruse some of the other airline related websites you will hear a constant cry of "WN doesn't have the lowest fares....(fill in the blank with the name of your favorite network carrier) undercut them by $10 or $15 or $20 on an advance purchase ticket." That's probably true. Yet WN continues to carry more domestic passengers than any other airline (with the exception of DL depending on the month) and makes money in the process. How does an airline whom the cognoscenti on these boards ridicule as having "cattle car" service manage to extract a fare premium over the network carriers?
They do it because THE PASSENGER REMEMBERS. Passengers recall when they found out they could zip from BWI to BUF one morning and back that night for a job interview that led to a better position....without having to mortgage the house or sell the kids off for medical experiments. Passengers don't much like having to pay $450 for a 1 hour flight when the guy sitting in the same cabin right next to him paid $79.
Not my intent to turn this one in to a WN vs U thread. However, since U's management keeps squalling that the company is on life support, employees need to work for a buck sixty an hour....and WN is making good money while paying their folks well AND giving them profit sharing....it would seem sort of obvious that some of what they do should be emulated.
HP has tried a less onerous fare structure. Gee, they are making a little profit. And a whole lot of their routes run right in to WN's. What is it about pricing your product in a less ridiculous manner that your management can't comprehend?
But...keep dragging your feet. waiting and introducing Gofares in markets that WN has announced service to. The traveling public is not nearly as dense or as stupid as your management obviously believes. What the wait does is create an aversion to your product by the public.
You can keep telling yourselves that U's product is so vastly superior that, when given the option, folks will turn their nose up at WN with their ugly planes and unassigned seating. A whole lot of folks have lost a whole lot of money over the years by telling themselves that.
U has assigned seating. Whoopee! WN will give you about 2 or 3 more inches of legroom in coach and will give you a full beverage service on a 40 minute flight. U may extol the virtues of their FF program, but you know, depending upon where you want to go WN will give you one that is its equal or better. Not everyone wants to go to Tierra Del Fuego nor do they have the cash to head to Monaco (the country, not Lewinsky) and would be more than happy to let 5 1/2 RTs between PHL and PVD earn them a unrestricted ticket anywhere WN flies...they can go to Las Vegas and gamble away the kids' college education fund or somesuch.
But to get back to my point (instead of rambling)...time and tide wait for no man. Fixing the fare structure is waaaaaaaaay overdue and the fact that nobody has done anything about it just reinforces the belief that management doesn;t really want to give up price gouging....they cannot see the forest for the trees.
