I wouldn’t mind if my ticket were a dollar more expensive so I could have bottled water without thinking about it, no.
Seeing as how US Airways recently booked my brother from Cincinnati to Zurich, via Washington DC and Paris, but failed to note that the DC to Paris flight did not exist, forcing him to get a one way rental car and return to Cincinnati, driving all night, to start all over via Newark, I don’t think I’ll be buying any water from US Airways. *
He didn’t get any compensation but did did a form letter from the airline saying “we’re sorry you were not happy and hope you’ll fly with us again.” :rolleyes:
- candidate for longest sentence award.
Speaking as someone who never drinks water on an airplane I would mind. Why should I be charged so you can be given water on the plane without having to hand over another couple of dollars? If I am not making use of the product, I don’t want to get charged.
Bottom line, I think, is that if airlines cannot remain viable, they’re not charging enough for their tickets. Maybe the average middle income family of four can’t afford that trip every year to Florida to go to Disneyland. It seems that casual flying is one of those things available to the fortunate.
Ticket prices are too low because of competition, not because of providing drinking water.
I’ll pay Cyros’s dollar.
Anecdote: One time when I was a kid I asked the flight attendent for an empty cup. She asked why and I said because I was going to take it in the bathroom and fill it up and drink it. She said NO, that water is NOT drinkable! Let me get you some . . .
I don’t know if she was trying to be nice and just get me a “better” cup of water, or if it really wasn’t potable. My dad was a lead mechanic for US Air[ways] for 20+ years, so he should know. I’ll ask him next time we talk.
(a) I fly a lot. I have never been on a catered flight (so that may rule out super short commuter flights) where the FAs did not make available free tap water in a plastic cup. The new USAirways policy (which indeed does appear to eliminate this availability – click through to the WSJ article from the Huffington link) strikes me as going overboard – sure, you should pay for stupid bottled water, but not for tap.
(b) Yes, restroom water is potable. Some airlines have little plastic cups in the restroom.
My read on it is they are taking drastic measures such as they are because many of their (high) costs are fixed, their recent exposure to geometric increases in fuel prices is highly variable, and consumer willingness to absorb these costs is limited.
Operating airlines profitably is tricky at the best of times. Millions and millions of dollars are spent by every airline every year on “revenue management” software and modelling – basically, figuring out the “right” witches’ brew of byzantine fare classes and rules that will lead to maximal revenue per mile flown.
Every airline executive would be deliriously happy to “charge enough” for tickets if he thought he could get away with it – they’d gladly fill their aircraft with 120 businessmen paying $11,500 each to fly Business Class from Boston to Sydney. And I’ll assure you, those businessmen would not be wanting for water or other creature comforts.
Unfortunately for the airlines, a good part of the actual flying public (or the flying public that has emerged in the past 20 years with LCCs) is fairly price-conscious, views air travel as a commodity to be selected based on cost, etc. In short, they’ve created a customer base whose expectations about the cost of air travel are based in an era of much cheaper operating/fuel costs.
I’m assuming someone has run the models and determined that when oil quadruples from $30 to $120/bbl, you can’t simply, say, triple the cost of the lowest economy fare without destroying ticket sales among a large part of the customer base. One could say, okay, the airline could just adjust supply to meet demand, and they are doing that by cutting flights, mothballing planes, etc. But airlines make money by having relatively-full planes in the air, most of the time, not by parking them in the desert, and flying routes with 16 passengers on a 140 passenger plane becomes a death spiral because it’s not all that much cheaper to fly a near-empty plane than a full one.
All of which leads to: the airline’s Prime Directive is to fly full aircraft, and they will price tickets accordingly to get people in the seats. If the U.S. public is resistant to increases in “fares,” then “fares” will be kept artificially low but the airlines, once they have you in the seat, will immediately try to claw-back this subsidy any way they can – fees, surcharges, a la carte amenities. Irritating*, but economically quite rational.
*The airline exec would say we (if “we” are flying in economy, domestically) don’t even have much right to claim irritation – at least to hear the industry people tell it, domestic economy is marginally profitable at best, and business/first class full-fare sales are what subsidizes the rest of the operation for most mainline carriers.
But this just goes right back to post #13. It’s stupid. Say you have 150 people on the plane and every single one of them buys a bottle of water. That’s 300 bucks. Big deal. You can’t fly from Dallas to Ft. Worth for 300 bucks these days. Just charge $2 more on every ticket and you’ll make more money. You’ll never lose a passenger over $2 on a several-hundred dollar ticket, but you will absolutely lose passengers over a $2 bottle of water. This is just dumb beyond comprehension.
You’ve heard the olive story, right?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3073562/
More notably, when Northwest cut out free pretzels, they claimed they saved $2 million a year.
Now, USAirways is a fairly crappy airline, and I’m willing to entertain the possibility that their revenue-maximization calculations were, in fact, dumb beyond comprehension. (I suspect that if any of the recent cuts gets reversed, it will be the no-tap-water part of this one). But they also pay a lot of people a lot of money to make these decisions, and apparently those people are betting against your assumption that they will “absolutely lose passengers.” (If nothing else, all the other carriers may follow suit, at which point the bar has just been lowered across the board).
That just supports my point. Airlines fart $40,000 without lifting a cheek. Raise every ticket by a dollar and you’ll make $40,000 in a couple days - forget about a year. And the article said a half million on pretzels.
And pretzels and olives are a different story, anyway. You’re allowed to take your own pretzels and olives on the airplane.
The next world war will start over water. Think of the whole rigamarole we are presently going through with oil and then imagine it being repeated 50 years later but with much, much higher stakes. Gas at $4 a gallon? Ha! It is to laugh! That’s kid stuff! How about fresh water priced at $8 a gallon? Fun fun.
They’re really digging deep between the sofa cushions on some of their recent measures… pilliows and blankets, checked bags, even removing unused wire.
They funnel millions through and every single zillionth of a hay-penny adds up.
The hassle of collecting the money for a bag of pretzels and keeping track of it seems like a bigger pain in the ass that just tacking a couple of bucks onto the fair, tho.
It appears to me that the Free Market System just can’t handle airline services.
So regulate. If the company can’t handle that, get out of the way.
And if a traveler can’t afford to fly, take the High Speed Rail (also regulated, but cheaper).
Another thing to keep in mind is how the business is structured and where the cuts are being made. I can easily imagine the high-paid consultant rifling through the balance sheet and – as they’re paid to do – identifying “waste,” especially in non-core (i.e., non keeping the airplane in the air) areas.
So the consultant says: You’re spending $X on water and $Y on pretzels! You could cut your catering costs by $Z!
CEO accordingly calls VP for Catering on the carpet. “Why are we spending so much on food and water? You’re not even a profit center for us – cut the red ink or else!”
Catering – which is indeed a cost center, and which has no influence over fares, but has just been told to trim its total costs, does the only thing it can – and does it tout de suite, because in modern business, cost center guys know they are second class citizens because they don’t directly drive revenue.
So yes, that’s an alternative scenario in which one division of the business may make a penny-wise, pound-foolish decision by focusing only on its narrow concerns.
At this point my impression is that the airlines are simply struggling to survive long enough to (a) see fuel costs drop; (b) renegotiate union contracts; © maybe if lucky get a gov’t bailout; or (d) find an advantageous merger. Insolvency is just around the corner for any of them. If they avert insolvency, by hook or by crook, AND if the travel market rebounds, that is their ultimate payoff: scoring windfall profits in a booming market, in which half of the competition has been eliminated through bankruptcy.
In that context, their desperate measures don’t seem so ridiculous.
I don’t want to get charged 20 times cost because you don’t want to pay another .10. So my interests outweigh yours because if you win I am out about 20 - 30 times what you would be out if I won.
How about two classes of tickets? One ticket conferring benefits in the form of water & pretzels and another ticket sans benefits? The benefits ticket is $4.00 more expensive than the other. Would that keep the airlines afloat? I’ll bet that most of the public would opt for the more expensive ticket, thinking that ticket would confer FREE benefits. Or not thinking at all, which is more likely.
These airline execs probably have taken a few business courses and I’ll bet you that two dollars that they have studied the issue extensively and decided that a typical customer would react better to a cheaper fare with a cut in amenities than to a higher fare.
Frankly, I am amazed at how cheap air travel is. It is about the same price while fuel costs have quadrupled. My mother flied down here to visit me for $160 round trip airfare. She would have paid about $500 in fuel had she driven, and had to stay at a hotel overnight at a half-way point.
I remember the old days of flying, too, with the meals and booze, smoking sections on planes, and flight attendants that waited on you hand and foot. Younger people are not used to and do not expect that level of service. It is part of the reason that online shopping and Wal-Mart have taken over the world.
If I want to buy a power saw, for example, I don’t need a knowledgeable salesperson to show me several different models, try one out, etc. I will go online and buy the cheapest one with the specs I want; even if it is 5 dollars less.
Bottom line price is most important to the average consumer. You don’t get free bottled water anywhere else, so why do you expect it on a plane?
From your post I think you were either not really talking to me or you didn’t read all my posts in this thread. I don’t think you should get free bottled water on the plane. I think you should get free regular tap water on the plane, just like you get everywhere else, even at businesses that don’t have you hostage at 30,000’.
This is a way to boost revenue and my point is, keep your customers happy and just raise prices a dollar or two without saying anything. Everybody wins. (Actually I think they need to raise prices a lot more than a dollar or two, but for the sake of this discussion they’re assuming this little scheme is going to make a difference, so so am I.)
The free market service might handle airline services if it were ever tried. Check out this link. It says in part;
While United’s rank-and-file try to figure out how to survive on reduced benefits, Tilton will be taking to the bank $4.5 million United put in trust for him. Just three months after taking over at United, Tilton guided the airline into bankruptcy and engineered the forfeiture of United’s pension responsibilities. Meanwhile, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, he had already cashed in on $3 million from those guaranteed retirement trusts.
So what happened? Back in May of 2005 United Airlines, on the verge of collapse, was allowed to shift the burden of their pension responsibilities on the US taxpayers. This allowed them to keep operating, and at lower costs than the other legacy airlines. Since their costs were lower, they were able to keep their prices low and other airlines were forced to follow suit. Healthy airlines are being killed to subsidize sick ones.
Had United been allowed to collapse, certainly many jobs would have been lost, and airfares would have gone up, but the surviving airlines would have been in much better shape, and they would have picked up many of United’s workers and routes. In the long run it would have been better for the industry.