Originally Posted by
Dashdog
Seems a shame that we are back trying to be all things to all people. I thought we had reached something of an equilibrium in the industry whereby the major carriers would be the full service airlines for people willing to pay the actual cost of the product, and the LCC's would take care of the rest. Having all these different service levels on one aircraft doesn't really work, does it? I guess the lessons of the past have to be relearned.
Two things look what the ULCCs have done in Europe. They've decimated the "legacy" carriers over there. Those carriers have started offshoots of their own in order to compete. Second ULCCs are quite a bit of a money press. Their margins are about 50% more than ours.
One issue I have with this is our CASM is around 12¢ per mile. Spirits is 7¢. We could 'compete' all we want but we will lose money and never make it up in volume (the old way of doing business).
That being said we have to stop Spirit and Frontier. If we don't take this stand they will gut our business and our jobs. We'll eventually all be working for an ULCC, Delta and possibly UAL will be OK (Delta has figured out that their brand is important). As posted in this thread we have a horrible 'premium' product and management is more interested in buying back stock than investing in the company right now. Eventually our profits will start to come down and we'll have less and less money to invest back into the company. This is what happened to all the legacies over the past 15 years, a long slow death.