There's more - the business traveler does not see the airline value proposition anymore either. They cannot/will not pay those fares. The big fear for the US majors is that these people realize they can fly SW and others quite easily - especially coast to coast. These new learned habits are very scary for US majors. If you have a travel budget of $2000 for the month and you need to see all your customers, how are you going to do it compared to your previous budget of $10,000 per month? I would be on SW and JetBlue in a heartbeat...and try very hard to keep my job. If you have overseas customers, you likely would fly a foreign flag airline because they offer better service for the same price. Living in America is now at that level in my opinion. -----Original Message----- From: The Airline List [mailto:AIRLINE@LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU]On Behalf Of David W. Levine Sent: Tuesday, August 20, 2002 7:30 AM To: AIRLINE@LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU Subject: Re: Profitiable Airlines ? On Tue, 20 Aug 2002 damiross2@attbi.com wrote: > Yes, there is a correlation between the two. It's > called customer service. Given a choice between > good customer service and poor, the smart people > will chose the good over the poor, even if it costs a > few dollars more. True enough, but one of the very real quandries the major carriers face is that an increasing chunk of thier revenue comes from customers who don't, to a large degree, care about traditional customer service. They don't fly very often, they have very little brand loyalty, and often don't really behave as if they recall prior experiences. Yeah, you leave them in the snow in Detroit for six hours in a smelly DC-9 without food, they'll steer clear of you, but that's about it. Food, don't care, lines, expect them. Legroom, don't recall it enough to remember who has it and who doesn't. At the same time, the majors desperately want to keep their business/ brand loyal customers happy. For the customer who pays for a dozen tickets at non bargain basement prices, customer service really does matter. You see some of this with things like offering customers with status in your frequent flier program easier paths through security and the like. I think that one thing we may well see, as this business cycle continues to evolve, is that the majors will find ways to reward the people who they need to influence, and not spend a nickle on the guys who don't have enough brand loyalty to be worth the trouble. The current fad for offering status in the frequent flier programs for everything *but* flying makes this hard. I'm wondering if we'll start to see some serious changes in this soon. - David