The airline industry has all sorts of structural similarities with telecom. Capital-intensive, prone to big busts, and obsessed with price discrimination. Both have also suffered intense government interference for decades. Bums on seats, packets through routers.
My parents are due to fly up to Scotland tomorrow to help my wife look after the kids whilst I’m away at Freedom to Connect. (Be brief, Martin - you’ve still got to write your keynote speech…) As retired former British Airways staff, they’re flying up standby. There are about 60 flights each way every weekday between Edinburgh and London, and lots of competition between 5 airlines. But there are probably fewer BA flights each day than when I first flew the route about 25 years ago, when BA was a state monopoly.
Anyhow, I was just reminiscing on this, when I remembered that BA used to guarantee that if you turned up, they would sell you a seat and fly you. Apparently the feature started in 1974. They branded it as their Shuttle service, and I remember TV ads where there was an empty plane save the one excess passenger. Yes, they had spare aircraft at the ready at each end just in case a flight became oversold.
So the expensive monopoly was using guaranteed quality of service to justify its unique position. Indeed, they could threaten that if competition was allowed then such benefits would have to go.
Sound familiar? Give me 60 flights a day and rock-bottom fares anyday!
Anyhow, we were once the beneficiaries of this policy. A flight that we were listed for sold out, so they laid on an extra plane for the overflow passengers, which we staffers on standby also got on. I think it was a 757, quite a big plane for 10 passengers. When we got to Heathrow, the pilot had a bit of a heavy landing, but the plane was so light that we bounced off the runway!
Quality of service really isn’t good for you, after all.
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