Originally Posted by
forgot to bid
Well, how much is Acela from NY to DC? Oh wait I'll google it. $400. Round trip walk up fare today from NY PENN to Washington Union. 3 hour trip.
It's $800+ for a walk up ticket today on either USAir's shuttle or ours.
But what's the time when you really include traveling to LGA via a cab or what have you, checking in, security, waiting for an outsourced regional to get it's act together (personal experience), 1:15 flight, land, cab to DC? <- and that's all if it's on time and no typical LGA delays.
Why do I have a feeling a 3 hour train trip is better and more reliable?
I've thought about that too. With us owning 1/2 of LGA now (plus massive capacity at JFK and a little at EWR) I wonder if we could work something out with ATC whereby shuttle flights go ahead of any and all DL (and affiliate) flights whenever possible. For every shuttle priority departure/arrival that effects any other carrier, we'll concede 2 priority departure/arrivals to competitors. SWA would probably throw a few million in pizzas to help us grease the skids on that as well.
The positive effect on the shuttle would be dramatic while the negative effect on the rest of the operation would be relatively negligible (who cares if you're number 18 or number 20 for departure on a 3 hour flight? But it makes a huge difference if you're number 3 or number 18 on a shuttle flight).
If we could get the taxi time down in LGA and the pad time down in BOS by finding a way to work with ATC in a way that the other carriers can see a net positive for themselves, we could easily cut the shuttle flights to almost half their scheduled block times which would radically increase the time value premium for them especially if we had priority/trusted traveler/shuttle pax only lines at BOS (the MAT in LGA is already about as easy as it gets anyway so not a lot of fat to trim there).
Yeah yeah, I know, more legs per day or whatever. That could be fixed with a special shuttle rig that rigged them to the old block times with the rest of the base departures benefitting from slightly increased block times so it would be a net gain for pilot credit times with a disproportionately larger revenue and market share increase for the company.
Throw in a few other perks like free wifi on shuttle flights, bonus miles, etc. and we could help tip the scales against USAir to the point they couldn't even justify doing it in a 190 and get it all ourselves and then we'd really clean house.
Nah forget it. There's no money in shuttle.