ropestart

Lol, these are getting better and better!!

UncleVito

Great plan. Walk around our passengers with low tier stickers all over your bags, like they need another reason to think that already. What's next, hold a sign during boarding that says " I am a dumb ***"? Not sending the right message, nobody will know what the heck your talking about and wont care enough to ask. All they will know is you are low tier. Have fun with it - making yourself look like an idiot

full of luv

Your CEO said it to your INVESTORS, it's not a big secret. If he wants to brand NK as LOWER TIER, should your customers be the only ones to not be in on the public secret?

Maybe your CEO will say that you also carry lower tier passengers so many of them will not know what "TIER" means without a careful explanation.

The Juice

Thats the point....if a passenger asks why you have a "low tier" sticker on your bag, you say "My CEO thinks the pilots here at Spirit are 'low tier"

Having passengers see this is the only way Bob will be held accountable for what he said. I would love for a newsfeed to pick up the fact that Spirit pilots have stickers noting they are low tier pilots. They sure as heck wont pick up a small memo ALPA sent out to its members.

Does walking around in circles, holding little signs, in the hot heat, make pilots looks like "idiots" as well? Because that day is coming as well.

If they dont ask about the stickers, who cares. They saw it. Its war, sometimes many small paper cuts make the most damage. Swallow your pride, we fly a big yellow airplane.

Al Czervik

Been watching this thread. May have missed it... The CEO stated the pilots are "low tier?!?!?"

gringo

He most certainly did. During the last weeks earnings call.

Said we don't rate industry standard wages because we're low tier. Also, because our upgrade times are now longer than both Delta and FedEX, but I'm guessing he didn't get that message.

Phteven

What really should count is what passengers are actually paying. I pulled up some numbers from the BTS DB1BMarket data table comparing NK and WN. Here you go:

LAS - FLL, Q1/2015, 10% sample of all purchased tickets (approx. 200-300 tickets per carrier).
Mean fare on NK: $153.89, mean fare on WN: $234.50
Max fare on NK: $583, max fare on WN: $712.15
Distribution of fares is normal and almost identical between both carriers.

These are "itinerary fares" which account for base fares + baggage, big front seat upgrade, etc. Not 100% certain if it includes buy-on-board food and drinks, but even if doesn't it looks like if you pay an average of less than $80 per fight for soda and snacks on NK that you'll come out ahead.

Also figured since this is a longer flight, it would probably show NK closer to WN than typical (i.e. more likely for checked bags and BOB purchases). Comparing LAS - LAX the difference in average fares is much larger.

Qotsaautopilot

Gotta say I'm not sporting a low tier sticker and I don't even have a place to put it without a flight kit anyway. Kind of like the FA bag tags that said barely fair. No one made the correlation to the FA contract. It just made the pax think about their ticket. This slogan is even worse. I think it is akin to a sticker that says "I'm a dip****". It's too vague to understand.

Maybe a lanyard that says "our CEO thinks we are low tier pilots" or a sticker if you have a place for it.

Or
"Professional pilots
Low tier compensation"

"CEO says we are low tier pilots
We are professionals
Contract now!"

"Low tier fares does not mean low tier pilots
CEO says yes it does"

The Juice

In fairness for accuracy...here is the exact quote. Clearly stepped on his junk. I dont think he believes the pilots are of a lower quality than other airlines, just that we should be paid lower because our pricing is in a lower tier than legacy carriers. Pure crackhead logic, and im loving the fallout over this.

Analyst asks-"Okay. And as a followup to that, Bob, I know you want to avoid negotiating in public, but the industry wage bar is rising at a pretty rapid clip for aviators and your cost structure obviously is already quite lean. Is it inevitable that the next pilot contract reduces margins? I mean, when I think about the flexibility that some of your competitors have, they can densify, they can make offsetting revisions to profit sharing, they can add back seats, that kind of stuff. I mean you're already doing all of that stuff. So am I missing something?"


And Fornaro says
"No, I think, there are again a couple of differences and like I said, in terms of pricing, there are tiers. You have, again, Frontier and Allegiant well below us and that's our peer group, and you move into another bracket, you have JetBlue slightly above us and then you actually have the legacies, and I think there is a context for all this stuff. And in terms of what we offer, we offer fast growth, our pilots become captains much earlier than their peers."

GetReal

Maybe since management believes we should be compensated less because our upgrade times are so low, we should be trumpeting to the public the fact that our Captains will be the least experienced in the industry?


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