Buzzlightyear

Just gonna leave this right here.

https://onemileatatime.com/american-...roject-kodiak/

Smoke Toliet

They just don't care about the product or how our cheap product kills employee moral. Their philosophy is you have to fly on us(monopoly) because of our size not because you want to. Dollar store Doug has publicly said we don't effect the bottom line. The AAG BOD seems to support everything this team is doing as long as the money rolls in. I wish we could be proud of our product but its just not that way and there's nothing I can do about it. At this point I go to work and do a professional job because it represents me not my employer. Just hoping the doors stay open for 20 more years.

Al Czervik

I wonder if the BOD/shareholders know this is the belief of 95% of the employee group?

FLT000

ULCC re-designation shortly

black cat

Better question, do they care?

aa73

They won’t start caring until they see massive passenger migrations (and the accompanying $$$ losses) to UAL, DL and the others. Apparently that is not happening... yet. “Minimum Viable Product” means that they have a graph that basically plots the question “how cheap can we make the product while still ensuring they keep coming back?” And no they don’t give a hoot about the bad publicity...as long as they keep coming back.

By contrast, DL, UAL these days tend to be more along the lines of “how much $$$ can we invest into the product while still remaining profitable”...hence they have realized that investing in their product actually creates substantial profits along with customer loyalty.

That is 180 degrees from Doug’s M.O. It runs against his basic management style of doing everything as cheap as possible.

That said, Airlines are cyclical. Remember when UAL was the bottom of the barrel five years ago.. look at them today. We’ll get back to being a premium airline some day... but it’s gonna take a pretty big management change.

Varsity

By the time you notice traffic declines, it's too late.

Dallas has turned into an echo-chamber of cheap, bad ideas. No accountability or vision at the top.

It's not like Doug and Co. hasn't had the better half of a decade to figure this out. Pretty sad fall from grace for AA.

iahflyr

American will lose business travelers because of this. The problem is it will takes a few months or even years to be noticeable, but it will happen. Even those who fly more than once a month, it will take many months before they ride on a Project Oasis plane. But once they do it once, and realize it’s just as bad as Spirit, they will start leaving.

Varsity

The sad part is it took decades to build those corporate contracts and relationships. Some of them will be lost on a single flight.

The management of this airline is approaching negligence.

Name User

I noticed last year Group 9 basic economy was maybe 5-10 folks per flight. On my commutes I've been counting as they board and I'm running around 30% maybe 40%. Groups 1-5 are business folks for the most part and take about 1/4 to 1/3 of the plane, then a small amount of Group 6-8 which is mostly full fare paying coach, then Group 9 BE filling in the rest.

I agree that adding so much BE pax will dilute your business. The real question is with the growth of the ULCCs, do they have a choice? I don't think so.

Maybe they just need to do a better job sectioning off the cabin. Make BE the back 30% of seats and make it exactly like Spirit.

The problem with AA going full on BE a la pull a Frontier is our costs are double on a per mile basis what Spirit and Frontier are.