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Comment by frenchman99 | Hacker News Reader

In 2018, Air France more than doubled its profit, to 409 million a year. Paying more only gets you so much with these huge airlines. They don't reinvest everything you give them. Their goal is mostly to make more profit or increase share value, especially if publicly traded.

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Profit in isolation is a meaningless metric in this context. In 2018, Air France KLM carried over 100 million passengers. So the profit is just 4 euro per passenger. That means very small changes in costs per seat can quickly move the company from the black to the red.

Also, with full service airlines, business class is by far the most profitable use of their square footage. Cheap economy flights are really an extraordinary thing, but they’re never going to be the height of comfort. Personally, whenever I’m flying economy, I’ve mastered the art of simply shutting down any expectation I have of comfort from the moment I arrive in the airport, until I arrive at my destination.

That’s how we are going to end up with standing only places and paying for the toilet. Do not accept the unacceptable.

I think the subtext is that flights aren't supposed to cost what cheap economy flights cost; they should be substantially more expensive. So you can "unaccept" the discomfort by paying for them what they should cost.

Is how I read the previous comment.

I can get a seat on a flight that will take me to the opposite side of the world in less than a day for ~$600. That’s not unacceptable, that’s amazing. Cheap and fast international travel has to be somewhere on the list of most revolutionary post-industrialisation innovations.

Varig was an airline in Brazil that was amazingly nice. Even economy seats got real blankets and actual silverware for dinner.

You'd love it, if it were not for the fact that they went bankrupt in the 90s when the first low-cost carrier entered the Brazilian market.

There are plenty of carriers (some might even say all of them) today without standing places where you don’t have to pay for using the toilets and many of them are profitable. You don’t need to accept ridiculous things for that. It’s just that every time, one of them will try to squeeze just a few more cents out of you and if the public allows them to do that, all the others will jump at the opportunity.

> many of them are profitable

Until they aren't, and either they need to find way to cut costs or extract more value per-passenger.

> You don’t need to accept ridiculous things for that.

Then don't? What's stopping you from not flying with low-cost carriers?

I already avoid easyjet/ryanair, even if the tickets from some company like KLM/Aegean costs more than double.

>Personally, whenever I’m flying economy, I’ve mastered the art of simply shutting down any expectation I have of comfort from the moment I arrive in the airport, until I arrive at my destination.

Sounds like you've never flown on an Asian airline. I flew on Singapore Airlines a few months ago and economy there was like first-class on an American airline, but with smaller seats.

> I flew on Singapore Airlines a few months ago and economy there was like first-class on an American airline, but with smaller seats.

With flat beds and everything? How can they possibly afford that?

Perhaps I should say business class.

Anyway, I'm talking about the level of service and comfort: great meals, blankets, pillows, beautiful and friendly flight attendants, hot handtowels, free wine/beer, even some warm socks for wearing to the bathroom, are all standard in economy class. Several of these are probably not even available in First Class on American carriers, such as the handtowel or socks or free alcohol.

> Several of these are probably not even available in First Class on American carriers, such as the handtowel or socks or free alcohol.

I think you must have an atypical experience of US business or first.

Towels, socks, free alcohol are all basics on US carriers that you always get in business or first.

Free alcohol is available even in economy on every US carrier I’ve been on.

>Free alcohol is available even in economy on every US carrier I’ve been on.

Citation needed.

>>such as the handtowel or socks or free alcohol. >Towels, socks, free alcohol are all basics on US carriers that you always get in business or first.

No, I'm not talking about towels, I'm talking about a handtowel. It doesn't exist on US planes, because it's an Asian custom. It's a hot, wet towel that they hand out to everyone before every meal so you can wipe your hands. It's called an oshibori in Japanese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oshibori https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/22372/in-asian-re...

> Citation needed.

https://www.united.com/web/en-US/content/travel/inflight/eco...

"Complimentary house beer and wines, soft drinks, juices, tea and freshly brewed illy coffee"

That's in economy.

> It doesn't exist on US planes, because it's an Asian custom. It's a hot, wet towel that they hand out to everyone before every meal so you can wipe your hands.

Yes, hot wet towels. You get them before meals on US carriers as well. Here's a video of them being handed out in economy on a domestic US flight.

https://youtu.be/KzUyCxFLQP8?t=85

Believe me now?

It’s probably the airline I’ve flown on the most. The flight attendants are nice, and you get a little ammenities bag. But none of that changes the fact that you’re packed into an economy class seat for x hours. The food is honestly not any better that other full service airlines either.

Honestly, I have no idea where you’re getting this from. There’s certainly economy classes out there worse than SG, but to compare it to any first class experience is complete nonsense.

The same seat gets used on most days, by many different passengers (and many of them are used by multiple passengers per day).

By a conservative estimate, profit per seat per year would be large hundreds to small thousands of euros.

409 mm on what revenue? The airline industry is insanely competitive and generally has tiny margins

..... and?

Is your business' goal something different?

People can fly on different airlines. I used to treat myself to cityjet now and then for a nicer experience when flying DUB->LCY. But usually I took Ryanair, because I valued saving ~100 EUR more than a somewhat more pleasant flight and less time in transit.

I found that the cost of transit subtracted substantially from the benefit of Ryanair. They tend to fly from out-of-the-way airports, requiring an additional transportation link. It wasn't very expensive, nor are other airports exactly downtown, either. But between the money and the time, it shifted me away from Ryanair on some legs.

Yeah, the train ticket from Stansted to London was more than the flight a lot of the time. I ended up going between them depending on circumstances. If I was booking late (couple days' notice) Cityjet was almost always competitive.

There are plenty of businesses whose goal is not mainly profit, but selling a good product/service. RSE and environmental issues are more and more important to businesses. Paying good salaries should come next. Profit for people already rich enough to invest should come last. That's the only way to get sustainable growth and a healthy society.

I believe deeply that we need a profound, fundamental reorganization of our economy and culture to avoid apocalyptic climate breakdown and social collapse.

But, right now, starting a business with goals that aren't profitability leaves you vulnerable to somebody else who _will_ maximize profitability.

In your own life, even, trying to do things that don't maximize profit (taking more holiday, etc.) leaves you vulnerable to competition from other workers who will do that.

We need to design systems where maximizing profit (something humans have been trying to do forever) produces behaviours we desire, like treating the planet and other people better. But blaming a single business working within the constraints they find themselves in is unlikely to help.

For example, the lesson of Union Carbide is that it's OK to murder tens of thousands of people through incompetence and willful negligence. Other companies that spent more on safety were effectively punished for doing so, since of course they would have to spend more. This is why we still had Hydrofluoric Acid a risk of killing thousands and thousands of Philadelphians as recently as a few weeks ago.

>But, right now, starting a business with goals that aren't profitability leaves you vulnerable to somebody else who _will_ maximize profitability.

Don't assume that corporations around the world are all run with an American mindset and according to principles taught in American MBA schools.

I don't, and I know this. But they still have to compete with them.

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