Transcon Service from BOS & JFK

[Cart Pusher]

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On 8/12/2003 10:31:40 AM AAmech wrote:

You guys are a little behind the times.  AA's highest walk up Y fare between JFK and LGB and Orange County airport is $299.00!  Business Class is $599.00 walk up!    Same price for JFK-SJC!  These are narrow body 757 flights.

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I'm not behind the times at all. LGB airport is alot less expensive. This now starts eating away at the yields in one of AA's bread and butter markets. It might have only been $299 each way from LGB but it was still over $2000 round trip for a walk up fare from LAX. Those days are over.

 

[TWAnr]

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On 8/12/2003 12:55:33 PM Cart Pusher wrote:

I'm not behind the times at all. LGB airport is alot less expensive. This now starts eating away at the yields in one of AA's bread and butter markets. It might have only been $299 each way from LGB but it was still over $2000 round trip for a walk up fare from LAX. Those days are over.

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A good friend, who is an elite frequent flier with AA, does a lot of consulting with the DOD in Washington. He flies from LAX to IAD, on average, twice a month on short notice. Even though he is reimbursed by the government for his airfare, he recently made the switch from AA to JetBlue in order to save close to $2,000 ($2346 v. $588) per round trip on this route. His partner did the same, even though the drive to LGB is at least half an hour longer, for each of them, than to LAX.
The business model of gouging the business traveler is as dead as a doornail.

 

[Veritas]

Fred On Everything
By Fred Reed



American Airlines Like Sinus Drainage, But With Wings


August 4, 2003





You've heard of air rage? I've got it. I'm building an invisible plastic chain-saw with a six-hundred horse motor to cut the wings off every airplane owned by American Airlines, before chopping the flight crews into runny gruel.
Friday morning, August first, San Francisco International. I showed up to catch a hop, AA 482, to Dallas-Fort Worth en route to Guadalajara. The line in front of the American ticketing was just flat huge. For an hour and twenty minutes by my watch people waited to check in. Yet between two thirds and three-quarters of the check-in desks were closed. American, presumably wanting to save a nickel, preferred that we stand there like cattle. We did.
The flight left way late. Why? American couldn't find a vital stewardess. Yes. Just misplaced her. Maybe they left her behind a seat cushion. Who knows? In any event, a whole plane-load of people with things to do had to wait, and wait, and wait.
Incompetent management. Airlines know they need stewardesses. Thing is, the airlines also know that the public will accept any degree of inconsideration, stupidity, and humiliation. Which is why we get them. We're patsies.
Next, clonking down the jetway, we picked up our Bistro Bags. You know, nasty little sandwich, nickel bag of chips, thingy of peeled dwarf carrots. They call them Bistro Bags because somebody in marketing figured it would make us think we were having a European Dining Experience instead of a sorry bag-lunch. We boarded. No one actually said "Moo."
The cabin crew were par: Not quite surly, but not under any constraint to be agreeable. The major US airlines barely tolerate customers. One suspects that they would be happier without them.
Off we took, finally, after the usual claptrap read from a card at high speed about how to fasten our seat belts and how the stews are there for our safety. Actually they're just waitresses. Hoping to sleep, I slid into the vague unpleasant torpor that flying has become. Normally people put themselves to sleep by counting sheep. On these aerial Greyhound buses I pretend that I have leprosy and count my fingers falling off.
American squeezes you relentlessly. To deaden the ambience I asked for a dismal little bottle of bad white wine. Five bucks. Decent airlines, meaning foreign ones, don't try to milk you for everything from beer to headphones.
Predictably, the waitress didn't have change for a twenty. Why not? It's a common bill. Maybe she didn't know she was going to need change when selling drinks. How could she? After all, she had only done it four times a day for ten years. Maybe the association just hadn't quite flowered in her neural thickets: "Urg…Sell things…need change…Ahhh!" I pictured an evolutionarily advanced monkey learning how to poke at a coconut with a stick and shrieking with delight when it fell. She said she would come back. But didn't.
Over an hour later we were preparing to land, and still no change. The stew was forward, gabbling with her accomplices. Was she going to remember or wasn't she? The odds looked bad. I politely asked a near-by crewmember, a blonde kid with bad teeth who looked to be maybe twenty-four, if he would check on it.
He crossed the line from barely civil to deliberately snotty. "Sirrrrr! We aren't going anywhere," followed by loud remarks, intended for me, to a passing stew: "He wants his change. Hey, the ATM's broken." Clever little wunx.
He knew he could get away with it. This is the operating principle of the domestic air-transport business: You can get away with it. Lousy food, late arrivals, missed connections, surliness, gouging. These engaging traits once characterized Aeroflot, but they've migrated.
The preponderance of power lies with the airlines, and they know it. Any remonstrance and they can make an air-rage beef out of it and you miss your next flight. They figure the public has no recourse.
Finally, DFW. I needed to make the connection because people were waiting for me in Guad. But with American, making a connection doesn't really help. My next flight, AA 1401, couldn't leave because they couldn't find the pilot. So help me. No pilot.
Why not? Was he hung over? Still drunk? Couldn't find the airport? Didn't feel like working? In a lineup at the local precinct? Who knows?
Perhaps American will think I'm being too demanding-another sorehead customer. Maybe they are right. Maybe it is unreasonable to expect airlines to provide certain things: ant farms, say, or the Bhagavad Gita in Swedish, or a Faberge egg, or a pilot. I mean, how could American predict that it might need a pilot?
We sat, and sweated, and sat. Finally they told us that they had found a pilot, but that he was on another airplane. How very useful.
Either they can't staff their aircraft, or just don't care. It doesn't have to be this way. Used to be, flying United out of Dulles to the Far East, I always actually flew All Nippon Airways, which code-shared with United. ANA amounted to a major upgrade. Seats were larger, the food was great, the flight attendants hadn't recently graduated from prison-matron school, and they didn't try to gouge you for after-dinner cordials or a stray brew.
Now, I know that American has not the slightest interest in me or anything I might possibly do. (Of course, they don't know about the invisible plastic chain saw.) I fly only six or eight times a year, only two of those being long hauls to Asia. Business fliers are presumably American's money. I don't count. I know it. Still, what I did was call Claudia at my travel agency and tell her never, ever to book me on American, and always to choose a non-US airline when prices were close.
Nonetheless I note with delight that United Airlines went bankrupt (it's as bad as American, except that it usually has pilots), and American teeters on the edge. I hope it drops. Companies that peddle a sorry product with wretched service and abrasive personnel desperately need extinction. I'll celebrate with ribs and beer.
Would you go to a restaurant that couldn't find its cook and waiters and got you your meal after leaving you in the parking lot for an hour and a half? Don't do it. Fly foreign carriers outside the US--they're better--and the econolines domestically when possible: JetBlue, AirTran, Southwest, Frontier. They're all good. If you subsidize lousy performance, you get more of it. If second-rate airlines go out of business, tough.
Splendid, in fact.
[url="http://www.fredoneverything.net/AmericanAirlines.shtml"]http://www.fredoneverything.net/AmericanAirlines.shtml[/URL]

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[TWAnr]

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On 8/12/2003 1:09:26 PM TWAnr wrote:




The business model of gouging the business traveler is as dead as a doornail.
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Someone in Dallas obviously disagrees with me:

American raises fares for walk-ups
By Trebor Banstetter
Star-Telegram Staff Writer




FORT WORTH - American Airlines has quietly raised the price on last-minute tickets from Dallas/Fort Worth Airport to 11 cities by as much as 65 percent, effectively ending an experiment with cheaper business fares that it launched last year.
When American unveiled the slate of discounted walk-up fares in November, airline executives hoped it would draw business travelers back to unrestricted, last-minute tickets instead of the cheaper leisure fares that require an advance purchase.
In December, the airline expanded the test to 400 routes nationwide. But by April, the project had been scaled back in many cities.
And Friday, the cheap business fares at D/FW vanished, said Tom Parsons, chief executive of Arlington-based Bestfares, which monitors airfares.
The return of higher-priced walk-up fares to cities including Philadelphia and Los Angeles means American is hoping business travelers return when summer ends, Parsons said.
[url="http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/business/6514447.htm"]http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/business/6514447.htm[/URL]

 

[MiAAmi]

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On 8/12/2003 121 PM HPearlyretiree wrote:

Full does not equal profitable, as AA is showing to everyone!

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Again, check your facts. AA has a positive cash flow on operations for May and June. July looks very good.

 

[MiAAmi]

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On 8/12/2003 12:55:33 PM Cart Pusher wrote:

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On 8/12/2003 10:31:40 AM AAmech wrote:

You guys are a little behind the times.  AA's highest walk up Y fare between JFK and LGB and Orange County airport is $299.00!  Business Class is $599.00 walk up!    Same price for JFK-SJC!  These are narrow body 757 flights.

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I'm not behind the times at all. LGB airport is alot less expensive. This now starts eating away at the yields in one of AA's bread and butter markets. It might have only been $299 each way from LGB but it was still over $2000 round trip for a walk up fare from LAX. Those days are over.

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Do you not read any of the previous posts? The AW fares starts at $299 and work their way up to around $1200. Are the high last minute fares really over?

 

[funguy2]

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On 8/12/2003 4:41:18 PM MiAAmi wrote:

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On 8/12/2003 121 PM HPearlyretiree wrote:

Full does not equal profitable, as AA is showing to everyone!

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Again, check your facts. AA has a positive cash flow on operations for May and June. July looks very good.

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Positive cash flow is not profit. TWA had several years of positive cash flow, and still were unprofitable from operations for 10 or 11 years until sold to AA.

Why is Positive cash flow different from profit? Well... Lets see cash flow comes from asset sales (i.e. stakes in WorldSpan, sale/leasebacks of unencumbered aircraft) issuance of new debt (works like a cash advance from a credit card), and government grants, all in addition to operating revenues and expenses. I believe AA lost $350M or so for the last quarter. I don't recall hearing that they were cash flow positive, but they could have been.

At any rate, cash flow positive and not profitable is not sustainable... but it certainly prolongs life as you search of a solution, as was the case with TWA... IIRC, TWA was beginning to get a positive buzz as the end of Karibu was near and a small glimmer of hope began to appear for a very short time near the end. Of course, then the biz fare bottom fell out in May 01, then the terrorist attacks... but I am wandering off the topic.

 

[funguy2]

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On 8/12/2003 4:44:56 PM MiAAmi wrote:

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On 8/12/2003 12:55:33 PM Cart Pusher wrote:

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On 8/12/2003 10:31:40 AM AAmech wrote:

You guys are a little behind the times.  AA's highest walk up Y fare between JFK and LGB and Orange County airport is $299.00!  Business Class is $599.00 walk up!    Same price for JFK-SJC!  These are narrow body 757 flights.

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I'm not behind the times at all. LGB airport is alot less expensive. This now starts eating away at the yields in one of AA's bread and butter markets. It might have only been $299 each way from LGB but it was still over $2000 round trip for a walk up fare from LAX. Those days are over.

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Do you not read any of the previous posts? The AW fares starts at $299 and work their way up to around $1200. Are the high last minute fares really over?

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Well... $1200 would seem to be about half of the $2000 fare quoted... Assuming these fares are accurate... so if AWA's top fare is $1200, that would seem to be significantly less than AA's top fare of $2000. Right?

 

[MiAAmi]

Again, there is probably room for AW in the market. If AA feels threatened you can bet you'll see AA adding markets like JFK-PHX and JFK-LAS. Our new MIA-LAS does very well.

 

[HPearlyretiree]

OK, what will AA's 3rd Quarter profit be then?

 

[MiAAmi]

It wasn't all to long ago that we all had our doubts about AW making it, so don't count AA out yet. I happen to think we will see much improvement over the last 2 quarters. But I'm no expert. Its no secret that the discount carriers are not making it easy for the majors to get back on their feet, but lets wait and see what things look like a year from now. until then....I prefer the 767 over the 319.

 

[AAmech]

Small correction here. AA was "Cash Positive" in May. In June AA posted a "Net" profit. July was also projected to post a "Net" profit. Having a net profit, even a small one is far better than just being "cash positive.

 

[AAmech]

Forget about what AA's going to do. How is JB going to respond to HP invading their home turf? And lets not forget about DL,CO and UA.

 

[Cart Pusher]

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On 8/13/2003 8:00:26 AM AAmech wrote:


Small correction here.   AA was "Cash Positive" in May.  In June AA posted a "Net" profit.  July was also projected to post a "Net" profit.   Having a net profit, even a small one is far better than just being "cash positive.

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Wasn't AA's second quarter profit solely because of the government give back? I mean, if AA hadn't gotten the government security fee reimbursement then they, like all of the other majors, wouldn't have posted a profit at all but another loss - isn't that right?

 

[Tango-Bravo]

Well I see what a bargin HP will be for that business traffic. Pulled up a random flight departing LAX Nov 3 and retun on Nov 7. The fare is only 1218.00 plus a few add on taxes of up to 23.00. Now if you are a leisure traveler you can go for 324.00 plus the same added taxes. Sounds to me as if HP is trying to match AA business fares and carry a few leisure travelers.<BR><BR>

Really?!?! What is your source for this misinformation? The fare I find for HP on all possible JFK-LAX-JFK combinations for the same dates (Nov. 3-7, a Monday through Friday) is 401.50-405.50 if purchased today (Aug. 16). Even when pricing the fare for the same dates with a purchase date of Nov. 3 -- a true "walkup" fare -- the price goes to 616.50. All fares include all taxes.