Originally Posted by
Mason32
This RAH business model is scary..... hire people for terrible wages and work rules... claim poor mouth every time ANYBODY asks for anything... then loan Midwest millions, while signing a contract that puts mainline pilots of the street... and then just a few months later, outright BUY another large aircraft operator... not too bad for a company that never had ANY money to pay their employees fairly, or treat them fairly....
I blame Priceline, Orbitz and Alfred Kahn. The validation for this sick model is provided by 50 million clicks of the mouse every day. The enemy is sitting in the seats behind the bulkhead. One thing and one thing only factors into their "bid" for a seat on your airplane... rock bottom price.
It's not that customers might not be willing to pay a little more, but how the information of what they are buying is presented. The on line "bid for seat" companies only present their potential tickets by price. They aren't as likely to mention the connection in DTW and EWR in bold print, as they are to show a ranking by price. Nor do they bother to state that you may have the least common bidder at the controls vs. a seasoned veteran. Set a Phoenix online university grad after those type of hits and your bound to get an RAH business model.
The real "need to travel" white collar businessman long since left our miserable little hub and spoke joke for the comfort and TSA free convenience of frac ownership and the charter world. What's left is the people that live near your hubs and the discretionary traveler.