One thing that most airlines failed in their 'pissing in the soup' strategies was that they didn't control customer expectations. United-Lite was (I'm guessing here) simply sold as a "cheaper" United. Expectations for hub-n-spoke, re-routing, luggage connections, meals etc, were never tempered. Customer satisfaction is in the pits and it goes down hill from there. One thing AC did that was different (and therefore contradicts my previous comment), was Tango was very specifically identified as being different. No connections, no hub-n-spoking, no connecting baggage, "all extras are optional." They even put Tango flights at opposite ends of the the terminal and in some cases (Toronto), they moved Tango to a different terminal a mile away! Other than flying under AC's air-certificate, it was a different airline. You can't even see Tango's flights on AC's (or even Star Alliance's) flight schedules. Though it is odd to see an old CP A320 in Tango livery sitting at O'Hare doing a ORD-YYZ run as an AC jet with AC seating. Matthew On Thursday, November 21, 2002, at 09:42 AM, Donald Mamula wrote: > On 21 Nov 2002 at 11:09, boblochry wrote: > >> I've always wondered about using the 757 in a low cost operation. >> It has the lowest cost per seat mile of any narrow body I can >> think of. But can DL fill it day in and day out? In the all >> coach configuration they are proposing, it is coming in at just >> under 200 seats. The other problem that "airline within an >> airline" operations tend to encounter is the drain on the >> mainline's own coach traffic. > > > In 1970, Robert Townsend wrote a book titled "Up the > Organization". I have always felt that the book was way ahead of > its time. > > Anyhow, from that book, on the topic of "greed" (page 127): > > To increase our share of the market a few years ago, I was on the > verge of approving the startup of a new subsidiary -- which would > compete with our bread-and-butter business -- at discount prices. > To verify my own brilliance, I tried the idea out on a tall, > rangy regional vice-president named Stepnowski. After hearing > the plan described in some detail, he sank the whole project with > one sentence: "I don't know what YOU call it, but we Polacks call > that 'pissing in the soup'". > > > Couldn''t sum up my own thoughts any better. > > Don > Fan of great business writing