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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   30733 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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for reasons unknown, customers discriminate by price much more heavily in air travel

What else is there? OK, there's of course loyalty programs, but you have to fly quite a lot for them to be of any serious benefit - to the tune that you have to either be rich or fly not on your own dime (e.g. work travel) to get benefits that are worth serious consideration. The basic service - i.e. the economy class - is pretty much the same everywhere. You get the same 2 inches to the next seat and same water-and-salted-mini-pretzels. You can't pay extra to not have your flight cancelled or to have less turbulence or anything else both affordable for a middle-class person and important. So, what else beyond price is there? For me that would be:

  • Convenience. I'd pay extra for non-stop vs stop flight - but lines probably can't easily change that.

  • Convenience 2 - I'd pay some extra for convenient time (not departing at 7 am or arriving at midnight) but less than for extra stop. Also probably hard for a company to make it optimal everywhere.

  • Overall cost - i.e. if I can save on bags charges, or fly to an airport for which the next leg of the journey would be cheaper, or have some other benefit like that, I may agree to get a pricier ticket if the difference is less than the benefit

That's about it. If I am not paying for it - e.g. work travel - I'd of course optimize for my own convenience and for whose miles would work better for me, but that's another story.

BTW, I usually do not downgrade my opinion about the airline because of one-off delays. Shit happens. If the company manages it reasonably (as a minimum - get me a hotel and a couple of meal vouchers if you delay me substantially, and have the staff handle it without panicking themselves and making me panic) - I'll write it off as such and move on. If it keeps happening then I'll likely start paying extra to avoid such an airline - but so far I don't think Southwest is worse than anybody else in this regard.

There certainly is some evidence that Southwest is an outlier: "More than 90% of Wednesday’s US flight cancellations were Southwest flights, according to flight tracking website FlightAware.". And "As of Wednesday, Southwest Airlines had canceled 58% of its flights scheduled for Thursday" whereas "By contrast, as of Wednesday afternoon, United Airlines had canceled just 11 flights scheduled for the day; while American Airlines had canceled 23, FlightAware said. Each figure accounted for less than 1% of the respective company's total flights.".

Yeah I get that there's a particular set of circumstances which broke SW model in ways that it wouldn't break models for other companies. The question is, how often this particular set of circumstances is likely to re-occur? If it's once-per-20-years, I won't likely pay much premium to not fly SW. If it's "every other year" then I'd be more cautious. If it's "likely to happen every time there's a storm", then I'd only fly SW if it gives deep discount and I am not particularly upset if the flight gets cancelled. But the latter does not seem to be the case - there were many storms before, and SW did not break in this fashion.

I am certainly not encouraging you to stop flying Southwest. But it is certainly a problem: It is very difficult to know how much more likely SW is to have a delay than other carriers, and hence it is very difficult to know how much of a discount you should demand. It might well be effectively zero.

Yeah this isn't really weather related, Southwest's solver/optimizer broke with the added constraints and they have to solve a gigantic travelling salesman problem with a lot more manual work now.

I usually do not downgrade my opinion about the airline because of one-off delays. Shit happens.

This is one of the ways in which airlines obfuscate things.

Pretty much every delay is a one-off in the sense that the airline relies on the delay only happening under unusual circumstances. But airline management and policies can make delays more or less likely--yet each delay will still be a one-off in that sense. The bad policies just change the frequency of one-offs. And you won't observe that frequency unless you take a number of flights on the same airline that is much larger than what a typical consumer does.

Yes, but even though each case is unique, there's not much new in general that happens in this area - people try to get from A to B, weather intervenes, staff gets sick, holidays come and go, etc. - there are some patterns that are going to eventually emerge. If every other time I fly particular airline I get some trouble, I'll start avoiding it. But so far I didn't notice such pattern with SW, is there one?

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