A couple examples of little things they do that are clever and should be copied by everyone else: check your bag at the gate 30 minutes before boarding and you can board early; a guarantee that your checked luggage will be in your hands 20 minutes after landing, or you get $20.
They are an airline that are trying things, experimenting.
It never ceases to amaze me that the airlines refuse to abandon this absurd policy of charging for a piece of checked luggage. When you look at when this practice was introduced of charging for checked luggage, the time it takes to board and un-board a plane has increased by about 20 minutes due to everyone trying to shove as much as possible into overhead bins. Perhaps this time axis doens't carry much weight for carrier? Although that would be hard to imagine. It seems like false economy to say charging $25 per luggage checked make sense when you have now added 40 minutes to each flight. I can count the number of times on one hand that my flight has left at its scheduled time even though it boarded on time.
It makes sense to the airlines. For them, it probably doesn't matter that much if you leave a bit late. The cost of the flight doesn't change with how much time it takes to board, so they're making more money by charging for bags (even if not that many people check bags). There might be 2nd order effects, like shifts being affected because flights take a bit longer, but I can't imagine that overwhelms the additional income from charging for bags.
The cost of a plane is v. expensive. Sitting on the tarmac for 1/3rd longer is VERY expensive, just in deprecation/interest/lease payments.
However, it probably makes sense because I imagine some/all airports charge luggage handling fees per item/kg, that are probably quite expensive.
They do it because it works, and the reason that it works is that passengers (and flight-booking web sites) tend to sort the list of available flights by base price. Only.
It would be nice if the travel sites let you enter preferences: "How important is a decent meal to you?" "How important is a free checked bag to you?" and so on, but I haven't seen any sites like that. There's an opportunity for someone. :-)
It's only when I go directly to carriers like Air France or Lufthansa that they specifically flag - for example - flights on an A380, which I am absolutely willing to pay a bit more for.
For example, I just booked ORD-SFO on UA in business, which is a completely different experience on the upper deck of a 747 (UA1213) than the usual 737 :)
Charging for checked bags didn't start until 2008, the better part of a decade after travel sites began. There is zero correlation between charging for checked bags and travel websites.
Prior to this awful and cheap practice the assumption was that you bought a ticket that covered the cost of getting you and a bag to a destination.
Advertise a low base fare and add extra fees/cut add-on services to make up the difference.
The checked bag fee is just one of the more recent ploys in a process that's been going on for decades.
This has not been my experience. Flying AA on the east coast regularly, the folks at the door generally seem to be super on top of eyeballing bags and giving out the red checked-at-gate tags liberally.
I'd pay good money for the ability to exit the plane early after the flight is over. I really don't care about boarding early, especially if I'm not looking for bin space.
Apparently not good enough money, first class customers get that privilege. Beyond that, the crew is required to finish certain landing procedures before allowing customers to disembark off the plane.
Airlines like Southwest have no first class. And Southwest lets you pay for priority boarding, so it stands to reason they could cook up a scheme for letting people pay for priority exiting.
And of all the airlines that necessitate being drunk to cope, Southwest is fairly high on the list.
right, so in other words, you're still flying the cheapest possible airline, yet claiming you'd pay good money for well-established privileges that are already available for good money on the open market on pretty much any non-budget carrier.
when it comes to luxury, you have to pay to play, and those who don't pay, don't play. end of story. you're competing with humans for space and time, it's going to be expensive if you want to be given special treatment.
(i'm a frequent alaskan airlines flyer, and try to always sit in row 6, unless i'm upgraded).
Is there a reason airlines don't board from the back of the plane first? As a first class customer you are assured of your overhead bin space anyway and you would spend the least amount of time on the plane. You would be the last on and the first off. But this would actually be thinking outside the box, not something you would expect of this ridiculous industry. What's the last time an airline did anything innovative?
> A couple examples of little things they do that are clever and should be copied by everyone else: check your bag at the gate 30 minutes before boarding and you can board early; a guarantee that your checked luggage will be in your hands 20 minutes after landing, or you get $20.
Is that (gate check bag) for free?
20 minutes or $20 sounds like a great idea too.
Yes. They make an announcement asking for anyone willing to check their bag at the gate rather than carrying it on, and anyone who does so gets priority boarding (at the same time as the "families with small children and anyone who needs more time to board")
I've never flown Alaskan, but it's pretty obvious what the appeal is: it's a small optimization to make flying a little more convenient and enjoyable for some people. It seems like it would be nice not to have to wait in the boarding line and manhandle my carry-on. Plus, the policy creates some goodwill because they're passing up an opportunity to nickle-and-dime you.
I've had the reverse. My experience with them is always miserable.
Honestly, they seem an airline stuck in the 1980s. For example, after we married, my wife changed her name & got a new ID. She realized she also needed to change a name on a future flight back home to Seattle.
Alaskan charged her $100 to change her name.
$100.
To update a field in a database. For a flight over a month out.
By contrast, she also had to change a Southwest flight. $0 & she was off the phone in 10 minutes.
Example 2: I actually tried to take advantage of the 20 minute guarantee at LAX. I was literally sent to SIX different people. My bags had taken 25 minutes to arrive.
It took another 30 minutes to get my $20 vouchers. (Because, damnit, I wasn't giving up on principle! To the chagrin of my wife.)
And those $20? It expired in 2 months.
And despite being delayed for for six bags for 3 people, I could only use one $20 voucher.
The boarding process is bizatine based on some complex rubric of status.
Half the Alaskan personal I've encountered are nice. The other half are pretty miserable. They clearly hate their job. Or hate the customers. Possibly both.
Their fees and even basic pricing is overly complex. Their planes tend to be older.
The only defense I ever hear comes from either 1) people who have status or 2) people who say other airlines are just as bad.
(2) just isn't true. I've flown Korean Air, Emirates, Jet Blue, etc. and they are FAR better.
There is part of me that wishes we had let United, American, & the others go bankrupt in 2001, so better companies would have emerged.
Anyway, I hate Alaska.
(Source: Me. I typically travel on different airlines once or twice a month.)