A lot of those decisions were made years ago by the genius that thought firing all the gate agents and ground staff and outsourcing was a good idea. Looked good on a spreadsheet but now you have a bunch of people that literally make the operation function and none of them have skin in the game.

This is fundamentally why Southwest was able to scale with at the time was a far inferior product. Employee buy in goes a long way. The employees there made that place an efficiency machine that was able keep people happy and get them where they wanted to go. We don’t do that. We get them there sometimes and late usually while ****ing them off in the process. Can’t scale without repeat business. Only so much low hanging fruit and we’ve picked it all.

Look at the top two in charge and their history. Merger, bankruptcy, strike, scabs, toxic work environments. Should we be surprised?

 

It's clear that both NK and F9 are having a demand problem, both having to heavily discount fares recently because bookings are down. When you have a lack of demand, putting more seats and jets in the air will only make it worse.

 

I found this quoted on another message board, not sure the source:

"The culprit according to Spirit is “softer demand for our product and discounted fares in our markets.” I will actually touch on that more tomorrow when I look at Frontier, but suffice it to say for now that there is a ton of capacity in Las Vegas and Florida where the ultra low cost carriers are concentrated, and demand is just not there to support it all.

In Q3, Spirit’s unit revenue plunged 17.4 percent to 9.14 cents vs last year. Overall total revenue per passenger dropped 13.5 percent, but it was only that good because ancillary revenue stayed fairly flat. Actual fare revenue dropped a shocking 27.8 percent year-over-year. As you’ll see tomorrow, this impacts Frontier as well, but the difference is that Frontier says it sees things stabilizing. Spirit says otherwise. We continue to see discounted fares for travel booked through the pre-Thanksgiving period. And, unfortunately, we have not seen the anticipated return to a normal demand and pricing environment for the peak holiday periods."

Having more jets and seats in the air will definitely not help the current ULCC situation.

 

Seems like the perfect rebuttal to the DOJ complaint then, the model is no longer sustainable and blocking the merger will ultimately lead to BK and Legacies becoming even more dominant.

 

OMG that definitely means the ULCC model is flawed and unscalable

 

Why are you so drunk on the ULCC koolaide? It’s a garbage product that customers love to hate as much as the DMV. Its success depends upon finding an endless number of passengers to anger and you and every other employee making less than their peers. It’s in the definition. Ultra Low Cost. Airbus isn’t cutting is a deal. The oil company isn’t cutting us a deal. That cost savings only comes in the form of efficiency (southwest) but we have incompetent management, and savings on labor.

 

Here's the source


https://crankyflier.com/2023/10/30/a...1ifL71HbCFYJd0

 

Thanks Bgood...

 

Nothing like setwa the minute the timer goes off just to sit at the gate for 10 minutes waiting on parking crew...

 

Doesn't matter if it's for different reasons if neither company can come close to making a profit. Now you are going to merge with billions in merger expenses ?? How on earth do you think this model will make money?? A giant JetBlue that hasn't been profitable for a long time.